Commercial NAS Operating Systems - A Comprehensive Overview of Core Features
by Ganesh T S on November 14, 2016 8:30 AM ESTSetting the Stage...
As we draw the first part of our comprehensive coverage of commercial NAS operating systems to a close, it is important to touch upon one additional core aspect. The setting up of multiple users, user groups, joining domains etc., LDAP or NIS authentication etc. are very important for business NAS units, but, not so much for NAS units targeting the home market.
Since the COTS NAS operating systems are all based on Linux, adopting the standard user / group strategy is not very difficult for the vendors. ZyXEL, as expected due to their targeting of home users, has only very basic user and group settings with quota support. Western Digital goes a bit further by allowing for multiple users to be created at the same time. Asustor, QNAP, and Synology have that feature and much more too. For example, Synology even supports 2-factor authentication for certain groups. Netgear does support some advanced features like Active Directory, but there are lots of things that Netgear could learn from the aforementioned vendors.
Today's piece dealt with the core aspects of NAS operating systems - storage and how it is configured, the user interface, setting up of the desired services and shared folders, and the configuration of the network links. Even though the coverage has been very subjective, there are some clear areas for each vendor to improve.
Asustor, QNAP and Synology have the setup process nailed down to a decent extent. However, Netgear needs to make its ReadyCLOUD process more robust. Alternatively, the RAIDar program should be fixed to avoid Java requirements. Western Digital's approach is almost perfect, given that they mostly sell systems with disks pre-installed. However, it would be good if a volume is created by default when the My Cloud OS is installed. ZyXEL's approach is passable, but the slow web UI leads to an unsatisfactory UX.
On the storage and services side, Synology and QNAP turn out to very feature-rich, followed closely by Asustor. Netgear still has some catching up to do as certain aspects like advanced SMB options still require an external package to be installed.
In terms of networking features, QNAP is very much on top. While all vendors have some sort of teaming implementation, QNAP has gone beyond that and started to implement various network modes that can really take advantage of the multiple LAN ports.
Next week, we will have a follow-up article that deals with value-add features. These include media services, surveillance (DVR for IP cameras) solutions, and the public cloud (integration with Dropbox, Google Drive etc.). We will also discuss support for virtualization - in terms of being a datastore, as well as the NAS being a host for guest VMs. A look at some of the third-party applications and the usage models that they enable will round up our comprehensive coverage of NAS operating systems.
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jlabelle2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
- About $300 for a 5 bay implementationSo what's the point then? If it cost 300$. How much do you really save then when a DS416J cost below 300$???
- I am just spreading the word
so do it: explain how you cover the basic functions I mentioned and then we will talk.
- the same feature set,
No. And you know it is true. Just the basic features i mentioned are not all available in FreeNAS.
- advise you that you can have an enterprise solution for the same cost as consumer cots
What are "entreprise solutions" that FreeNAS offers that "consumer" NAS do not? Could you share?
Namisecond - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Unfortunately that sale ended last year. They start around $800 right now. Once you add up the cost of a server windows license, an 8 bay COTS NAS starts to look more attractive. Add in the hot-swap bays, small form factor, consumer appliance-level power consumption and noise level. A roll-your-own server sounds less appealing. Some of them even use (or can use) mid-range Intel processors.jlabelle2 - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
^^^^^^One thousand times this.
JimmiG - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Quite happy with my 2-bay QNAP NAS. It's much smaller and more power efficient than anything I could have built myself.RTRR is great and better than RAID IMO. The versioning works great, it's super fast to sync and it protects against corruption, accidental deletion, ransonware etc. I don't care if my media collection goes offline for a day or two while I get a new drive and restore. RAID is for when you already have a backup plan, and you absolutely need 24/7 access to your data, such as business critical applications.
jabber - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeah I've been a QNAP user for years now. Small, quiet, low power and best of all all low effort. Sometimes people just feel they need to make a rod for their own back. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.tokyojerry - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Ganesh, thanks much for your intended series of posts to provide insight into NAS devices for the layperson to understand. I am relatively new to NAS devices and find something to learn all the time. So, I find an article posted like this one to be quite helpful. I've been running a NAS for just about a year now. I run a Synology DS1515+ but recently acquired QNAP's TVS-682T which still is not placed into production yet. The QNAP allows for added primary functionality of DAS and iSCSI in addition to NAS. I hope in future overviews of NAS devices you might cover these alternative configurations, when to use them, what they are for, etc. DAS I have basic ideas about but have zilch on iSCSI. Thanks muchvision33r - Wednesday, November 23, 2016 - link
Choosing your NAS depends on what you're planning to do. There's no question that any low end PC today can be converted to handle simple File sharing. If your project has multiple purposes and interfacing requirements then you might need more enterprise like features.I've done some pretty decent sized Vmware projects and SAN is your headless disk array group. At home I can replicate that with a good NAS appliance, sure it doesn't have some of the sexy tech out there like 10G or Fiber Channel but having enough drives to host your OS data and bonding multiple NIC through LACP is good enough throughput to have a decent size Vmware site in your house. You could do something like this with a built HyperV or standalone ESX box but you run the risk of having non-standard RAID and complexity to your storage. The goal is to simplify storage and decouple OS running system from their disk arrays that's why having dedicated NAS for scalability is important.
biladwardjwr48099 - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
The market for network-attached storage units has expanded significantly over the last few years.HP microservers are often down to about £170 new, given that we pay VAT and our currency is now worthless, I imagine they are about the same in $.www.earnwayz.tkbiladwardjwr48099 - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
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The article refers to Samba as a "protocol" (e.g. it says "accessible using protocols such as Samba or NFS") but it is not: Samba is a particular implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol.