FreeNAS Community,With 11.3-BETA1 now in the wild, and FreeNAS on the march towards 11.3 general availability in the coming months, I wanted to take a moment and give you a heads up on what’s on the horizon for 2020.As you may know, 12.0 is shaping up to be a significant release. The biggest changes coming to the product family will be a big update to ZFS, which brings us in sync with upstream “OpenZFS 2.0” (the official merging of FreeBSD support with the ZFS on Linux Project). Major features include native ZFS Encryption, Allocation Classes (Making a special vdev on flash for metadata), performance improvements, and more. We anticipate having 12.0 available for BETA sometime in mid 2020. While this is actively in development right now, we’ve also got some other exciting things going on behind the scenes.First up, FreeNAS and TrueNAS are going to be getting much closer. As most of you know, TrueNAS is built upon FreeNAS, sharing the same open-source base across products. Up until this point we’ve maintained each release separately, with different source repos, build processes, QA frameworks, etc. With 12.0 we decided to make all of our engineers and contributors lives easier by unifying them into a single image. This will provide a huge efficiency and productivity boost by allowing us to streamline our development and QA efforts, and it will have the added benefit for the FreeNAS community of higher quality releases and documentation. Going forward, the same extensive QA testing we put into TrueNAS will be directly beneficial to FreeNAS as well. No FreeNAS functionality will be harmed in the making of this merge, so rest easyNext, we’re going to be hard at work in 2020 to make our 12.0 code portable across multiple OS platforms. The middleware at the core of FreeNAS is already pretty portable today, and we want to start extending its reach. This also allows us to work on some new and exciting software products, complementary to FreeNAS, without disturbing or compromising the stability or reliability users depend on. We're excited to share what we're working on, but we're still early in the R&D phases, so we don't have much to reveal yet. Stay tuned for more info later next year!So with that, please pardon any of our dust on the 12.0 development side over the coming months. 11.3 is already shaping up to be the best FreeNAS and TrueNAS release ever, and we’re super stoked for what’s going to be landing for 12. These are exciting times for FreeNAS and we’re looking forward to the journey with you in 2020 and beyond.