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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tuxRoller - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
Raid is dead. The big data center distributed filesystems have moved to erasure coding (pick your parity! Who says 3 is all you need?).In fact, I'd say zfs is sitting at a rather odd intersection of: not best used for your desktop and not the best option for data centers. Surely there's some market there but it's still a bit of an odd duck.
tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
How is it expensive? Freenas is free.You don't need a ton of ram unless you are deduping (they don't seem to offer an out of band dedup, like btrfs, so they have to keep a hash table of all the blocks along with their locations, hence the origin of the rule of thumb "1GB/1TB").
It is, however, a ram hog (on Linux) in a slightly different way: whatever memory pages it claims, it owns and can't be reclaimed via the normal kernel methods (well, short of removing the module) unless it is on one of the solaris clones (it may not happen on the bsds as well, but I haven't really looked into the problem from their side).
It doesn't NEED ECC much more than your laptop does (btw, your laptop actually does need ECC since that greatly improves system stability). That whole thing has been a bit misrepresented and is more about reducing your chances of false negatives (corruption) when deduping or compressing.
I would, however, agree that it's overkill for your home server since it's quite complicated, needs tuning, and has a number of limitations you really need to be aware of.
If you're going to roll your own I'd go with something like flexraid or snapraid (with my preference being snapraid due to it being extremely well developed, open source, great community and responsive developers---ganesh doesn't much like it because it's not a "live" raid (meaning it only backs up when you tell it to, hence, snapraid) but that's all most home users need---periodic backups), but the benefits are terrific: it hashes your data (and can scrub it so that silent corruption doesn't occur), you can add disks to the pool as you need them without a massive rebuild (in fact, it should just take up the disk and add it to the pool without much else, assuming the disk is empty), use it on whatever os (and with whatever fs) you want, supports parity levels that make zfs drool (up to 6, iirc), and, if something happens that causes one of your disks to become unrecoverable, the only data you lose is what was on that disk (no striping---this also means you don't get the faster read/writes that striping can offer but, unless you are using better than gigabit Ethernet you can't even make use of that speed).
jbrizz - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
You'd be better off comparing this stuff to OpenMediaVault. It's essentially a NAS stack that runs on top of Debian (you can get it as an installable distro or install it from Debian with apt). Pretty sure it does everything these commercial NAS OSes do and probably more. I'm running it on a little i3 6100 system at home it looks after all my home serving needs (torrents, plex, samba, openvpn, IP cam footage, virtualisation, crashplan cloud backup, webserver, mumble server, FTP server). 45w idle with 6 disks (spun up) and two SSDs in it.jlabelle2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I have an honest question to those promoting those FreeNas / DIY server. I am myself a DIY loudspeaker builder so I clearly know that what you pay for is not purely components but also all the development work behind.So a question to you (pwr4wrd, jbrizz, cdillon....), let's assume you are a normal person without good IT knowledge:
* how long do you need to setup the NAS with a few users, folder access rights and services running compared to a Synology (for instance because this is what I have) that would require just a few minutes?
* do you have mobile phone or tablet application to access in a friendly way your photos? Your videos? manage and launch downloads? control your camera? manage your emails on your server? manage your files remotely? share easily to friends files, photo albums with fine granular control?
* do those systems support backup of cloud data to have incremental backup and recovery capabilities of your data in OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, DropBox...?
* do those system can encode videos on the fly to decrease the bandwith necessary to have access to your video from remote places on your smartphones?
* can you easily make cross-NAS incremental backup as my brother and father are also using a Synology NAS and we are making our off site backup in each other NAS?
* does those OSs can act as iTunes server and TimeMachine destination?
Those are just a few examples of very simple, out of the box capabilities on the Synology and I would be genuinely interested to know how easy ALL those non exhaustive features work on FreeNAS or other solutions you are proposing...
maximumGPU - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
good question, i would be interested in that as well. Maybe we can settle this issue that keeps cropping up on every NAS article. Honest answers appreciated.jbrizz - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
If you can install Windows can you can install something like FreeNAS or OMV, so many people could use it (although not a "normal" person), but your need at the very least a willingness to tinker. I've never used FreeNAS, but OMV uses a plugin system from the WebUI to add extra things like Plex, webserver, OpenVPN server etc. which in theory should be easy to get working, but in practise it's far from it. For the average person who needs network storage, a prebuilt NAS is definitely the way to go.darwinosx - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
The problem with a lot of the replies like yours is you are assuming NAS is just for network storage for most people when they do much more and are far easier to configure and run than roll your own.jbrizz - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
And to better answer your questions, regarding OpenMediaVault:*a few minutes
*a combination of OpenVPN and other apps would allow this, e.g. I use Remote Transmission GUI to start/monitor torrents so they are ready when I get home. My HikVision IP cameras have their own app which can be used when my phone is connected to my VPN.
*Crashplan have a linux app which can be run headless without a graphical interface. This works well to backup 1.4TB of data for me.
*Plex does this and miniDLNA (a DLNA plugin) can be configured to do this also. My i3 6100 has plenty of power to transcode 1080p on the fly.
*Some disk arrangements support snapshots, although I don't use it so can't comment. Crashplan does incremental backups to the cloud which is (1 min, 15 min, 1 hour, 1 day etc, so very regular) works well for me. I have a gigabit fibre Internet connection to help support this.
*I believe it does support TimeMachine and AFP with a plugin, not sure about iTunes or Apple TV.
jlabelle2 - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Thanks for the honest question. It seems very cumbersome and with a mix of various inelegant solutions and I am still puzzled about people laughing at customer of those NAS system which are plug and play.Coming back to the few points I mentioned:
* mobile app: is Remote Transmission an application existing on mobile phone? You spoke of Plex which is supposed to be great but was always much slower than Synology app for video and photo browsing. And Plex only stream MP3 music files even if I have FLAC. What about file management?
* Cloud: a non graphical interface to setup backup with complicated file structure is really far from user friendly. What about support of cloud that people are using? Crashplan is for backup. I have Windows devices so I am using OneDrive like hundred of millions of users. Most used cloud storage are OneDrive, DropBox and GoogleDrive. What about this support on OpenMediaVault?
* transcoding: good. Plex does a lot of thing but still not on par with proprietary solutions (see above).
* Snapshots is not the same as "standard" backup. Again, I am not speaking of "backup" in proprietary cloud backup but cross-NAS. Crashplan needs to be paid, constantly, until the end of your life. When you have already a NAS, I do not see the need for that when I can do it freely across different NAS from my family. From your answer, I deduct that it is a no. Speaking of backup in the cloud, I have a cable connection with 25Mbps in upload which is more than 99% of the population. So it means on an average around 2.5Mo/s so for my 4To of backup, it is a 20 days upload backup!!! With a NAS, you can send the data with a HDD and just start the backup with the incremental part with the initial transfer of bulk data made physically. How do I do that with cloud services?
* no support of iTunes or AppleTV is just a deal breaker for Apple users. Simply as that.
All in all, it confirms that it is 1/ much more complicated and 2/ much less capable. sure, it may be cheaper for the one that can configure and manage it and are fine with the limitations. But it is far from being an universal solution.
eldakka - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
Not answering all the questions (I don't, for example, use cloud solutions for data backup or access - that's why I have NASes), so I don't use the cloud.However with respect to table/phone apps and Transmission. Transmission is a bittorrent client. The client can run in a headless mode ideal for servers (e.g. NASes). You can also get applications that run on your local computer and on Android devices, whether tablet, phone, media-players or 'computer'.
But in the bigger picture, the 'app' for tablets and phones for Transmission and most of the other services you mentioned (photos, videos etc) is called "a browser". Most of these services (including transmission) offer, in addition to purpose-built apps, web browser enabled interfaces.