User:Bmilman/iXsystems

iXsystems, Inc. is an American computer manufacturer headquartered in San Jose, California that sells servers, storage appliances, and software and hardware services. It is a corporate successor of Berkeley Software Design, Inc. and Walnut Creek CD-ROM. iXsystems has a long history of involvement with FreeBSD. iXsystems sponsors and develops the FreeBSD-based open source desktop operating system PC-BSD and the open source Network Attached Storage software appliance FreeNAS.

History
BSDI was founded by Rick Adams and members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, including Keith Bostic, Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz and Donn Seeley. Jolitz, Seeley and Trent Hein were the company's first employees, temporarily working for Rick Adam's UUNET until BSDI started operations in 1991. In December 1991, Rob Kolstad was hired (at the time he was secretary of USENIX), and he would take over company operations just two years later.

BSD/386 was released in January 1992. The full system, including source code, retailed at $995, which was much cheaper than the equivalent source code license for the rival UNIX System V from AT&T (which cost more than $20,000 in the late 1980s.)

USL v. BSDi lawsuit
Later the same year, AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) brought a lawsuit against BSDI, alleging that BSD/386 contained their proprietary trade secrets and code. After USL were acquired by Novell, a settlement was reached in January 1994. This resulted in future releases, of what was now called BSD/OS, being based on CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release, which was declared free of any USL intellectual property. At this point, Rob Kolstad (of the University of Illinois and Convex Computer Corporation) was president of BSDI, and he would run the company until the close of the decade. For a long time in the 1990s, BSDI was the preferred platform of the major ISP's, and they offered special versions of BSDI tailored to the needs of ISP's, with support for 256-port modems and a high-performance multi-connection kernel PPP.

Mergers and Sale
In 1999 there was a shake-up by the employees and a new president was installed, with the intent of having an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as possible. At this point, other companies such as Red Hat had followed the IPO path in the Linux world, to great success. However, the new managers of the company decided to use a great deal of leverage to help build up the company.

In 2000 the company merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, a distributor of freeware and open source software on CD-ROM. Soon after it acquired Telenet System Solutions, Inc., an Internet infrastructure server supplier.

In 2001, under severe financial pressure due to too much leverage, BSDI sold its software business unit (comprising BSD/OS, plus the former Walnut Creek involvement in the FreeBSD and Slackware Linux open-source projects) to Wind River Systems and renamed the remainder iXsystems, with plans to specialize in hardware. Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards, while the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity in 2002 as FreeBSD Mall, Inc.

Faced with competition from FreeBSD and Linux-based operating systems, Wind River discontinued BSD/OS in December 2003. However, by this time some technology from BSD/OS had been contributed to the open source BSD community.

iXsystems
iXsystems' server business was acquired in 2002 by Offmyserver, which reverted to the iXsystems name in 2005. In 2006, iXsystems adopted the PC-BSD project and hired its founder, Kris Moore. In 2007, iXsystems acquired FreeBSD Mall, Inc., reuniting all the portions of the original BSDi that had been spun off from Wind River since 2001. In 2009, after Volker Thielle announced that the FreeNAS project was going to switch to a Debian base system, iXsystems offered to continue the FreeBSD-based development of the system. iXsystems re-wrote FreeNAS from scratch and released the updated version in 2011. Shortly afterward, iXsystems announced the "FreeNAS Pro" enterprise storage appliance, which was soon renamed to "TrueNAS". TrueNAS appliances run a proprietary operating system based on FreeNAS. iXsystems also added a "FreeNAS Mini" offering, which is a small home appliance that uses a stock FreeNAS install.

Products
iXsystems sells custom servers with Linux or FreeBSD pre-installed. The TrueNAS storage appliance is iXsystems' newest offering, having been introduced in 2011. iXsystems also offers software and hardware support for the servers and appliances it sells, and development services for FreeBSD-based projects.

Involvement with open source
iXsystems has a long history of involvement with open source projects. In addition to the PC-BSD and FreeNAS projects which it directly sponsors and develops, iXsystems is a major sponsor of the FreeBSD Foundation and often sends employees to staff booths representing FreeBSD at tradeshows around the world. iXsystems employs many committers to the FreeBSD Project, and iXsystems has organized the biennial MeetBSD California conference since 2008.