 With cluster being dropped and free BST losing some vendor support, what does the future of true NAS scale and true NAS core look like? Well, the short-term answers are both going to be fine. You can continue using them. But the long-term answer is going to be some evolving that'll happen in both of those ecosystems. And it may mean leaning a little bit more towards scale because of the brighter future that Linux has. But that's what we're going to talk about today. So let's get started. Now I want to start here right from the true NAS documentation. And you can see that they have announced that both true command, which was the tool that manages all of the true NAS servers, both scale and core servers, is going to remove cluster. And of course, true NAS scale 2404 has removed and deprecated cluster back end. This is because there is no future for cluster, not that is well preceded by IAC systems or anyone else. I can't say there's not a community for it. There's certainly people using it. But with a lack of developers pushing it forward and Red Hat dropping their support for it and no one picking it back up, they've decided to remove this feature. So that leaves us without a clustering option going forward. Now, this never got out of beta anyways. So it's not like this was used in any production true NAS systems that I'm aware of other than just some home users may be testing it out. But this does signal that they're going to have to change and do something different, which does lead me over to this Reddit post that someone made referring to the true NAS documentation and talking about it being deprecated. My thoughts on, hey, I never really understood Gluster over Seth, and then Chris Moore, senior VP of engineering for IAC systems. Unfortunately, the state of Gluster today doesn't leave us much path forward utilizing it for clustering operations. Good news is we're working on things internally to provide alternative options that I think will be easier and more useful in a wider variety of use cases, but too soon to announce any specifics. Now, while this is definitely a bump in the road for true NAS scale in terms of getting a clustered file system option available to people, I don't really see this as hurting the long term for scale because scale has been maturing fast. It's become, well, feature parity with true NAS core and getting really close and maybe even exceeding it in some areas of performance. The one thing they still have to work on, but that is, well, very transparently getting closer to done is fixing the way the arc system works in there to get it more on par with the way it works in BSD. BSD has had this right for a long time for how the caching works with ZFS and they're re-engineering a lot of things in Linux to get that feature parity up to par. So you can say, all right, now they are absolutely either the same or eventually, as we all know, the Linux one's probably going to exceed core. But that leads us to talking about core now and is that project dead? This is what people have told me since I did my first video all the way back in 2020 on true NAS scale. And here we are about four years later and true NAS core is not dead. We're still putting it in at customers. It is very stable. Now, obviously, I don't recommend using jails or any of the virtualization with core, but I haven't recommended them since years ago, even before the true NAS scale came out because I never found them to be the best solution. But let's talk about core. And I want to give a shout out here to Chris Moore, because if you didn't know, he's not just an open source advocate. He's actually a big BSD involved person. And I say that because he was the founder of PC BSD. So if you dig around in history, you're like, Oh, Chris Moore is not new to this at all. He's been a long time in a position of senior VP of engineering at IX systems and heads up both of these projects. And I feel he's been very transparent. And let's go over to his forum post talking about the future of core. Now, I'll leave a link to this entire thread so you can read through this entire forum post, which Chris Moore has a lot of back and forth with people that's really insightful. But I want to point out right here what Chris Moore says about BSD. We've seen a trend towards upstream vendors moving away from supporting it directly or giving it less of a priority versus a decade ago. Then we take a look at all the work that Intel is pouring into Linux for up and coming technologies like CXL, which be highly relevant to all of us. And from there, Chris brings up the question, does IX systems do the extra engineering work to prop up free BSD just to support core? They want to develop core on BSD, but do they also want to be heavily maintaining the BSD based on what they find in Linux importing it over because the vendors have decided to drop that support. This is something that makes sense if you have unlimited resources, but this is the problem most open source project faces. There's resources are much more finite and extremely driven by the community engagement. I've even seen someone suggest forking it as if that's a solution to the problem they're experiencing of more developers are needed. This is a challenge. A lot of open source projects faces. They have to figure out how they can keep paying developers to work on the project, how they can keep contributions going, keep people interested in the project to do even free contributions and also maintaining all of this. Now, IX systems is selling hardware that funds the developers that funds the product. They've done actually very excellent, very transparent, very open source and how they've done everything. And there's no fuzziness of how they fund it, but you have only so many people buying IX system systems in order to do this project and keep it all free. And at some point, I believe the resource allocation may cut out some of the BSD, but that doesn't mean it's happening today. Or even if it did happen today that the project is dead. Matter of fact, in 2024, they are shipping another update to TrueNAS Core. So there's not an end date in site, but we know the project with BSD overall is waning due to the lack of vendors writing these drivers. Then that means, well, there may be some new technologies that come out that are no longer supported in core. And it starts eliminating the user base for core and pushing things over to scale. Now scales under rapid development. There's a lot of other comments down there further that I'm pretty excited about talking about the new enhancements they're going to be doing for scale. Read that forum post to dive into those. But I love hearing from you. Leave your thoughts and comments down below. Let me know what you think about this topic. Join my forums, forums.learnsystems.com to talk more in depth than you can in YouTube comments about this and other topics. Like and subscribe to see more content from my channel. And sign up for my newsletter to keep up with the things that are going on. And I'll see you later or maybe in the forums. Thanks.