QNAP TS-x51 NAS Series: Intel Quick Sync Gets its Killer App
by Ganesh T S on June 22, 2014 6:45 PM ESTVirtualization for Home Users
QNAP heavily played up their unique Virtualization Station package when I talked to them at CES earlier this year. At that time, they were focusing on the TVS-x70. Quite frankly, I thought it would be a niche feature targeting very high-end SMB and enterprise customers. Users in that segment have traditionally preferred to separate their virtualization and network storage platforms, and are resistant to change. At that time, my impression was that It might take a couple of generations for Virtualization Station to catch on in that market segment.
Now that QNAP is playing up Virtualization Station as a trump card for the TS-x51 series (albeit with the restriction that only 1 VM can be run, and the NAS has to have more than 2GB of RAM), I began to think about this more. In their marketing spiel, QNAP portrays using the VM feature for fulfilling functionality available only on certain OSes. The example provided was that of a printer with drivers available only for Windows.
Power users running Windows on their HTPCs often use the unit for other tasks too. In fact, the popularity of the 'multiple concurrent users on a single PC' article on Missing Remote stands testimony to this fact. Others might have a physical PC at home used in a 'headless' manner, i.e, no display attached and just accessed through the 'Remote Desktop' feature. Typical use cases include home automation servers or just running download tasks (say, JDownloader or torrents or anything similar). In the case that users want to run those tasks on a NAS (and avoid the PC altogether), they have usually been forced to rely on 'apps' from the NAS vendor or 'third-party apps' for fulfilling the required functionality.
The availability of a NAS to act as a VM host enables users to run their OS of choice, say Windows. Most required functionality can be implemented / is already available on Windows. The apps can then be run on the VM (and in addition, they have direct local access to the storage too, without going through the network). These type of use-cases make Virtualization Station a very nifty feature.
QNAP's implementation does leave scope for improvements, though. For example, running a VM takes out one of the network ports for NAS usage in the TS-x51 series. While allowing the host OS to share the network port with the guest OS might preclude link aggregation, it could be useful in other scenarios where the NAS is shared between two different networks. Obviously, we also need to see how much performance gets affected while running VMs. All said, QNAP has to be given credit for being the first NAS vendor (to our knowledge) to release a OS with VM host capabilities.
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ganeshts - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
In a comment on another recent article, one of the readers stressed that deinterlacing is broken in the Linux drivers for the iGPU. I will check on the status with a review sampleDanNeely - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
Two questions, the first is a repeat from the initial announcement a week ago. What virtualization platform/virtual drive container format(s) is supported?The second is, why assume the additional USB3 is done by consuming a PCIe lane instead of by sticking a USB3 hub onboard as is common with current generation motherboards.
modulusshift - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
It would consume a PCIe lane either way. He's talking about total lanes from the CPU, not just the number a motherboard would expose like on normal desktops.ganeshts - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
I am not sure I understand the question entirely, Dan.Are you saying that current generation mobos have the ability to make a single USB 3.0 port from the PCH appear as multiple USB 3.0 ports on the board, i.e, is there a 'USB 3.0 port multiplier' that you are talking about?
As modulusshift indicates, most of the NEC / Fresco Logic / ASMedia based USB 3.0 ports that I see in the motherboards all communicate with the PCH using a PCIe lane.
DanNeely - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Yes. A lot of the current generation of boards offering 8 or more USB3 ports that have been reviewed on this site recently are being called out for using a cheaper USB3 hub chip (like what would be inside a 2/4 port USB3 hub on your desk) instead of a PCIe-USB3 chip like in the previous generation.4 of 5 mobo reviews on the front and second page call the board out for using at least on hub to add USB3 ports, just search the first page of the review for the word hub (the 5th only had 6 ports and presumably didn't need one):
http://anandtech.com/show/8045/asrock-z97-extreme6...
http://anandtech.com/show/7965/asus-z97-deluxe-nfc...
http://anandtech.com/show/7966/msi-z97-mpower-max-...
http://anandtech.com/show/7964/gigabyte-z97x-ud5h-...
ganeshts - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Got it! Let me see what QNAP comes back with, and I will update the article accordingly.DanNeely - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Not a problem. This is something fairly new; and unfortunately appears to be occurring at all pricepoints. I'm mostly ok with doing it on budget boards; but for higher end ones I'd much rather have the option of a 2:4 or 4:8PCIe lane PLX and PCIe-USB3 controllers powering all the ports, rather than have to worry about where I connect high bandwidth devices in the future to avoid bottle-necking. I'm really hoping skylake's chipset will have enough native usb3 ports to make this generation's designs a one off aberration.ganeshts - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link
Dan,Virtualization answers from QNAP: OVA, OVF, QVM, XML, VMX.
Confirmed that an USB 3.0 hub chip is being used
SATA - PCIe bridge list update in the article.
extide - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
No, if you used a USB 3.0 HUB then it would not use a PCIe lane, and that would leave you with two PCIe x1 lanes, so you could add two controllers (ex for the 8-bay you would need a 4-port and a 2-port).name99 - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
I find the premise of the article ("Intel Quick Sync Gets its Killer App") to be quite bizarre.In the Apple world, QuickSync has had its killer app for some time supporting remote desktops and video sent from a Mac to an AppleTV. For remote desktops in particular, while this was previously done with software encoding, the lowered latency of QuickSync makes a noticeable difference to the usability if you're connected via a high bandwidth connection. I expect there are substantially more people using OSX ARD than will ever buy this particular NAS.
There are probably similar use cases happening on Windows, but I don't know much about that side of the fence.
My point is not to criticize the NAS or talk up OSX; it's simply to point out that the article subtitle is more than a little ridiculous, suggesting, as it does, that poor little QuickSync was just out there languishing in the world with everyone ignoring it until this NAS came along and showed the world how to utilize it.