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 - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
The 'killer app' tag line was written from a HTPC / media-centric perspective. For a long time, users wanted QS to be taken advantage of by Plex. As a media transcoder, QS's potential was pretty much not taken advantage of by non-proprietary applications (OS X - Has Apple even exposed QS functionality to developers? Last I remember seeing, HandBrake on OS X doesn't support QS -- may have changed recently ; Remote Desktop acceleration using QS is not exactly media, but, yes, playback to AppleTV is a valid application wrapped in something proprietary).Another major point I wanted to convey in the piece was that Intel's VA-API efforts (making QS accessible through open APIs on Linux) has finally paid off in the consumer market.
Finally, I couldn't probably tag it as 'Killer App for Media Applications' -- that would just make it too long :)
shank15217 - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
Virtualization station is damn useful, imagine a open vpn server or even a samba domain server. If qnap develops this feature a bit more it would essentially make it one of the best soho nas out there.Beany2013 - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
I'd be concerned about resource usage - VMs are different to apps, in that they host the entire OS, crud and all.I'd rather drop the relevant SAMBA domain packages into the NAS, than put it in a full debian VM, chewing resources that it doesn't need; the NAS already emulates the filesystem, why blow (limited) resources making the guest OS also have to do this?
That said, I can see the benefits for some purposes, but it's pretty niche IMHO, until this class of device comes with a minimum of 4gb of RAM, which is by far the biggest limiter here. I'd never want an unattended full install of Windows 7 in a VM, for example, have you seen how big the WinSXS folder can get and how much disk access it can chew up when it's doing housekeeping tasks? Pretty much every time my scabby old (SSD equipped) Macbook starts dragging, it's because the Windows VM I use for troubleshooting has decided it's time to start pissing about with windows update - and not having a Windows (or any, frankly) unattended VM updated is just asking for trouble....
I like having the option, but I don't think I'd use it!
RoboKaren - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
FreeNAS running on FreeBSD. About the only thing it doesn't have is virtualization (it does have jails). And I trust ZFS (RAIDZ2) more than RAID5/6.ganeshts - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
Mobile apps for on-the-go access? The market segment where that is important is what is being targeted by these types of appliances.tuxRoller - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Not sure why you went with wowza when you could have just grabbed vlc and have it handle the quick syncing:)ganeshts - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Is that available on Linux? I see Windows support was added last year....tuxRoller - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Vaapi has had transcoder support for more than a year, now. The problem has been apps who don't use proper frameworks but their own solutions.For instance, you can use the latest transmageddon (which uses gstreamer 1.4.x) to access quick sync functions. If you feel up to it you can even roll your own pipelines for custom accelerated transcoding by using the commandline tools gstreamer provides.
In the future, go to some of the open source forums and ask for recommendations (don't take what commenters say as gospel). Not trying to lecture you:)
You'd be amazed at what's available (for instance, I'd disagree with your final page summation that you can't still "throw" Linux onto a nas and get comparable features to what you've shown here).
For info, irc is usually the best, but even the Ubuntu forums have vast numbers of knowledgeable folks.
AT might think about asking someone immersed in oss to chime in from time to time.
ganeshts - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
I am yet to see a Linux-based DIY build which is backed up by a good suite of mobile apps (similar to what Synology and QNAP are providing). All that I see in the various forums are ways to access the mobile interface of the NAS's web UI.Is there some way to automatically back up the photos that I am taking on my smartphone to, say, a FreeNAS-based (or some other similar) OS ? Any mobile app which can access content on my DIY NAS and get it to my smartphone or tablet with the appropriate hardware-accelerated transcoding at the NAS end ? For the latter, Plex could potentially be useful, but they are not bringing hardware acceleration into the picture at all.
lmcd - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
All I know: that's pretty obnoxious that first-stepping Bay Trail didn't get this. All those "Full Windows" tablets could be doing a whole lot better now if Intel shipped the product in its finished state.If AMD or Nvidia did this, there'd be a lot more coverage.