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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
103 Comments
View All Comments
driscoll42 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Any possibility of looking at homebuilt NAS solutions, such as using FreeNAS?Ninhalem - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
iX Systems sells COTS FreeNAS systems. I would have liked one of those included here in this comparison.DanNeely - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
At $1k for the 4 bay base model iX Systems is operating in a much higher price bracket (ZFS's advanced features devour ram and ECC is strongly recommended so they need much more expensive hardware than the arm/low end intel chips on most of these) than the primarily consumer tier models being looked at here.nagi603 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
You should have titled this article "commercial NAS systems", not "commercial NAS operating systems ". Going by the title, unRAID (a comercial OS that you use on a standard x86 PC) should also be included in this.Threska - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
It would be nice if Apple came out with one. The problem across all the one's presented is you have to be a geek just to understand the terminology let alone the concepts. Fine if that's the only group one wants to sell to. It would also be nice when Terra-byte SSDs come down in price to see a small form-factor NAS being built around them. Once again the current crop demands space, and in some cases lots of it.dave_the_nerd - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Apple makes the Time Capsule.MrCrispy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Apple's solution would be 3x the price, work only with Apple devices, be feature locked and frustrating and require you to upgrade every 2 years, but would work well for a very limited use case.cen - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
FreeNAS just wipes the floor with all this crap, it's not even funny. Any so called "tech enthusiast" should be ashamed of buying this off the shelf stuff. And don't even start with the "it's more expensive" card when people are buying top end GPUs like there's no tomorrow. The matter of fact is that ZFS will save you from data corruption, everything else is just a joke.Solidstate89 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
btrfs is designed to offer the same data protections as ZFS. If that's your only reason for using FreeNAS it's a piss poor one.cdillon - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
"The same data protections" is not entirely correct. Although btrfs has room to support up to 256 bits of checksum for metadata and quite a bit more than that for the data, it currently uses CRC32C, which is a whole lot better than nothing, but is not great. And it's your only choice.The default metadata checksum for ZFS (Fletcher2) is also "not great" but there are others to choose from and you can easily select SHA-256 as the default checksum on any ZFS filesystem, and this is automatically used if you enable deduplication because it requires it. Newer versions of ZFS also offer SHA-512, Skein, and Edon-R, so you have more data-integrity choices that range between ultimate cryptographic security and high performance.