Wow, so they claim they can push 1.5x line rate? My foot. I've got S class Isilon nodes with dual Xeons that can't do that unless they're streaming from cache.
I believe you hit the nail on the head with "streaming from cache". Whenever a company wants to tout maximum network performance they test it out of a memory cache. If this had a more aggressive cache (16-32GB) and managed it well, then that might not be such a tall tale. As it stands, even with the full 20 drive complement you're not going to see anywhere near that real-world. Sequential IOPS are mildly interesting, but only in the presence of random IOPS. No storage device is ever truly returning pure sequential performance, especially when it has an embedded OS to contend with.
For that matter, why haven't we seen Synology deploy SSD caching similar to what Drobo did back on the 5N/5D? It pains me that in every other respect Synology is way out ahead of Drobo, but if you need SSD caching to smooth out performance, it's seemingly Drobo or nothing (I count sacrificing precious 3.5" drive bays for SSD's as "nothing").
Synology does use SSD 1 or 2 drives in the DS1812 and DS1813. The list of supported drives is dismal. I blame it on their old buggy marvel drivers they haven't updated that are known to have issues.
If you use SSDs, the presence of two 10G SFP+ ports doesn't preclude the possibility of delivering over 2000 MBps of real world throughput for certain workloads.
Sequential accesses, such as reading of large video files by multimedia production houses, should be able to take advantage of such speeds.
I used ISILON 6000 (5 nodes), and I could clearly state it's a joke. Hardware is basic PC hardware, including consumer-level hard-drives, and software was clearly a failure. Including not detecting not reporting faulty drives, except if you pay for support to have access to updated software. A real joke!
As a side note, was years ago, costed more than 130K for 27TB storage, performances just fall when too loaded, then it takes it tens of minutes to crash!
My work was to save the GigaSize.com filesharing website and company to be crushed by this expensive failure. Was an associate.
Well, you certainly wouldn't want to run the whole thing as a RAID-5 volume, that's for sure. That said, modern NAS units can rebuild a failed 4-6TB volume surprisingly quickly, and 8 bays in the base unit make it more likely you can afford to use dual disk redundancy to protect against failures during the rebuild process, which substantially mitigates a long rebuild time.
Their rebuild on the DS1812, DS1813 is artificially limited. Single drive or consistency check with 4TB drives can take 3-5+ days. You can SSH in and speed it up if you know what your doing. Beware that the drives they say are supported aren't really in some cases. The kernel is a monolithic zimage that uncompresses into running memory. They have compiled modules with out dates drivers that have issues. (You cant modify see above.) Specifically Marvel controller chipset and modified them so that it will only accept their Synology branded expansion modules.
When will we see real-world use of 10GbaseT (I could have sworn recent NetGear units were using it)? SFP is okay for now, but is much more likely to be used in light datacenter applications. We won't see much prosumer adoption until 10GbaseT as SFP switches are just too expensive.
However, you can get core aggregation switches (10G SFP+ ports + multiple 1G ports) for around the same price as that of this unit : ~$1500 ; The one that Franklin @ Synology used here : http://blog.synology.com/blog/?p=2020 : is an example with 4x 10G SFP+ ports.
For our testbed, we use the GSM7352S - that has 2x 10G SFP+ ports and 48x 1G ports - but, it is a bit more costly than what Franklin uses in the above test.
Is it possible that the transceivers were included only for your review unit? If a pair of SFP+ 10GbaseT transceivers are included that would be a valuable add on that I didn't see in the announcement.
I use my DS1812+ as a NAS and iSCSI datastore for my test vmware server cluster. I also run Plex with transcoding which I find to be the most taxing of all the tasks. I would be very curious to know how the DS2015xs would perform with Plex as that can use a lot of CPU for large video transcoding.
I would not be shocked to see that it was simply unavailable for an extended period, this being a new ARM COU and all that.. If it ever supports transcoding remains to be seen. most (all?) arm plex distros do not support video transcoding according to plex forum.
The DS1813 does plex a little better but not enough. I think it has something to do with the people who right plex as well. Some versions stream great others just don't at all. It would be nice if you could set an application priority via Synology DSM. I believe you can set it to higher in PLEX. I have since moved the PLEX server to a VM and used the DS1812 and DS1813 for storage and other services. Plex connect with AppleTV, Roku and Xbox one work well with plex.
I use various Storage solutions. E.g., SONET should give some scope of my data requirements connected between locations in three nations. Building and Integrating two Hybrid Clusters was a bigger challenge.
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milli - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
What chipset does Synology use for those Core i3 based systems?ken.c - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Wow, so they claim they can push 1.5x line rate? My foot. I've got S class Isilon nodes with dual Xeons that can't do that unless they're streaming from cache.eanazag - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Two ports. I assumed it was a single port at first too.diamondsw - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I believe you hit the nail on the head with "streaming from cache". Whenever a company wants to tout maximum network performance they test it out of a memory cache. If this had a more aggressive cache (16-32GB) and managed it well, then that might not be such a tall tale. As it stands, even with the full 20 drive complement you're not going to see anywhere near that real-world. Sequential IOPS are mildly interesting, but only in the presence of random IOPS. No storage device is ever truly returning pure sequential performance, especially when it has an embedded OS to contend with.diamondsw - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
For that matter, why haven't we seen Synology deploy SSD caching similar to what Drobo did back on the 5N/5D? It pains me that in every other respect Synology is way out ahead of Drobo, but if you need SSD caching to smooth out performance, it's seemingly Drobo or nothing (I count sacrificing precious 3.5" drive bays for SSD's as "nothing").ZarnoththeDestroyer - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
Synology does use SSD 1 or 2 drives in the DS1812 and DS1813. The list of supported drives is dismal. I blame it on their old buggy marvel drivers they haven't updated that are known to have issues.edward1987 - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
There is SSD caching available: http://www.span.com/product/Synology-8-Bay-DiskSta...Drobo is not gonna be that reliable. Thats what you get for a cheaper box.
ganeshts - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
If you use SSDs, the presence of two 10G SFP+ ports doesn't preclude the possibility of delivering over 2000 MBps of real world throughput for certain workloads.Sequential accesses, such as reading of large video files by multimedia production houses, should be able to take advantage of such speeds.
iAPX - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
I used ISILON 6000 (5 nodes), and I could clearly state it's a joke.Hardware is basic PC hardware, including consumer-level hard-drives, and software was clearly a failure. Including not detecting not reporting faulty drives, except if you pay for support to have access to updated software. A real joke!
Never Again!
iAPX - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
As a side note, was years ago, costed more than 130K for 27TB storage, performances just fall when too loaded, then it takes it tens of minutes to crash!My work was to save the GigaSize.com filesharing website and company to be crushed by this expensive failure. Was an associate.
duploxxx - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
might see a few more desings like this once companys like AMD start building the server based ARM. initial release Seattle for example:http://www.anandtech.com/show/8362/amds-big-bet-on...
eanazag - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
The specs are good. It is too expensive to me for personal use even with two 10GbE interfaces. I would suspect RAID rebuild times suck.Do these type systems support hardware drive encryption in the likes of Microsoft's edrive in the storage OS?
eanazag - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I'm asking about the ARM based device.UltraWide - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
It's most likely volume encryption with the aid of hardware AES-type offload instruction set ala intel AES-NI.diamondsw - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Well, you certainly wouldn't want to run the whole thing as a RAID-5 volume, that's for sure. That said, modern NAS units can rebuild a failed 4-6TB volume surprisingly quickly, and 8 bays in the base unit make it more likely you can afford to use dual disk redundancy to protect against failures during the rebuild process, which substantially mitigates a long rebuild time.ZarnoththeDestroyer - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
Their rebuild on the DS1812, DS1813 is artificially limited. Single drive or consistency check with 4TB drives can take 3-5+ days. You can SSH in and speed it up if you know what your doing. Beware that the drives they say are supported aren't really in some cases. The kernel is a monolithic zimage that uncompresses into running memory. They have compiled modules with out dates drivers that have issues. (You cant modify see above.) Specifically Marvel controller chipset and modified them so that it will only accept their Synology branded expansion modules.diamondsw - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
When will we see real-world use of 10GbaseT (I could have sworn recent NetGear units were using it)? SFP is okay for now, but is much more likely to be used in light datacenter applications. We won't see much prosumer adoption until 10GbaseT as SFP switches are just too expensive.Peeping Tom - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I was wondering the same thing. Prefer RJ-45 myself. SFP copper cables are like $20 a foot. LOLganeshts - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Yes, the cables are quite costly at the moment.However, you can get core aggregation switches (10G SFP+ ports + multiple 1G ports) for around the same price as that of this unit : ~$1500 ; The one that Franklin @ Synology used here : http://blog.synology.com/blog/?p=2020 : is an example with 4x 10G SFP+ ports.
For our testbed, we use the GSM7352S - that has 2x 10G SFP+ ports and 48x 1G ports - but, it is a bit more costly than what Franklin uses in the above test.
mervincm - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
What are 10G SFP+ copper links?Do you mean that it has 2 SFP+ slots and includes a pair of 10G copper transceivers?
ganeshts - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Yes, that is what I meant - the connectors need copper cables, not fiber.mervincm - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Is it possible that the transceivers were included only for your review unit? If a pair of SFP+ 10GbaseT transceivers are included that would be a valuable add on that I didn't see in the announcement.Joshwa81 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I use my DS1812+ as a NAS and iSCSI datastore for my test vmware server cluster. I also run Plex with transcoding which I find to be the most taxing of all the tasks. I would be very curious to know how the DS2015xs would perform with Plex as that can use a lot of CPU for large video transcoding.mervincm - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I would not be shocked to see that it was simply unavailable for an extended period, this being a new ARM COU and all that.. If it ever supports transcoding remains to be seen. most (all?) arm plex distros do not support video transcoding according to plex forum.ZarnoththeDestroyer - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
The DS1813 does plex a little better but not enough. I think it has something to do with the people who right plex as well. Some versions stream great others just don't at all. It would be nice if you could set an application priority via Synology DSM. I believe you can set it to higher in PLEX. I have since moved the PLEX server to a VM and used the DS1812 and DS1813 for storage and other services. Plex connect with AppleTV, Roku and Xbox one work well with plex.akula2 - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Standardized lab environment? What does it mean?I use various Storage solutions. E.g., SONET should give some scope of my data requirements connected between locations in three nations. Building and Integrating two Hybrid Clusters was a bigger challenge.
iAPX - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Inexpensive for probably 1200MB/s over two 10Gb ethernet links or 800Mb/s over 1 10Gb/s (my guess!), it's a killer on it's own.It's time to switch to 10Gb Ethernet, and this one might be a Thundebolt killer, at least for me and my own use (photography, backup, etc)