Synology 1512+ vs Qnap 569 pro

[sfxguy]

(Moved this post from the peripherals thread)

Anyone have experience with these two units? They seem very similar.

I would probably load them up with WD 3TB Red drives.

Small group of artists, (around 5,) using Maya, Lightwave, Nuke and After Effects.
Around 20 render machines, (these will probably be the smallest, cheapest quad core Windows i7's I can get with loads of RAM, depending on when Apple updates it's mac Mini's.)

Easy to maintain since there is no dedicated IT person for this small a group of people.

I will probably set up Time machine backups of the artist boxes at night to the unit.

It looks like Crashplan is able to be run directly from within the unit on the Synology but not the Qnap? (I want to duplicate the TB's of data and keep a seeded Crashplan device at home since they limit their seeds to 1TB.)

They both have dual link lan (getting around 200MB/s from what their websites say.) There is a lot of data that is going to be moving around so I hope thats true, and 10gbe Lan is too expensive for this.

How are rebuild times in case of disk failure, (how long does it take?)

I have thought about a Pegasus Thunderbolt with a mac mini server, but this seems like it would be a data bottleneck since the above two units have dual link Lan ports.

Do either of the boxes have any significant hardware updates coming out I should hold off for?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[deconstruct60]

....
Small group of artists, (around 5,) using Maya, Lightwave, Nuke and After Effects.
Around 20 render machines,

The render machines are going to pull/push files to the file servers too? So peak loads of 25 concurrent users pulling files ?

It looks like Crashplan is able to be run directly from within the unit on the Synology but not the Qnap? (I want to duplicate the TB's of data and keep a seeded Crashplan device at home since they limit their seeds to 1TB.)

If exporting volumes from server for Time Machine targets what is Crashplan being aimed at. NAS to NAS backups ? Or something else.
If trying to back up Time Machine targets need to remember those files have a very high degree of aliasing. Crashplan may/may not deal with that very well.

I have thought about a Pegasus Thunderbolt with a mac mini server, but this seems like it would be a data bottleneck since the above two units have dual link Lan ports.

If buying a > $700 Pegasus a $30 dongle shouldn't be a huge hurdle.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/hands-on-apples-thunderbolt-gigabit-ethernet-adapter/

The bottleneck is going to be at the HDDs.

 

[sfxguy]

The render machines are going to pull/push files to the file servers too? So peak loads of 25 concurrent users pulling files ?




If exporting volumes from server for Time Machine targets what is Crashplan being aimed at. NAS to NAS backups ? Or something else.
If trying to back up Time Machine targets need to remember those files have a very high degree of aliasing. Crashplan may/may not deal with that very well.




If buying a > $700 Pegasus a $30 dongle shouldn't be a huge hurdle.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/hands-on-apples-thunderbolt-gigabit-ethernet-adapter/

The bottleneck is going to be at the HDDs.

Yes it essentially makes it 25 machines pushing and pulling data at peak loads.

It's not the equivalent of real time streaming, (such as editing HD footage,) but all the machines could saturate a single 1000mbps line.

Crashplan would be aimed at a backup of the NAS and would not be backing up Time Machine backups.

The Thunderbolt adapter is still just 1000mbps. I have one for my rMBP, but that is still a max of 125 MB/s, nowhere near the speed of the Pegasus.
That's why the dual-link aggregation of the QNAP and Synology are so appealing. Hopefully getting around 200MB/s.

The bottleneck is still the network, not the HDD's in RAID.

----------

I have seen people reporting connection, speed and slow finder issues with the QNAP and Synology devices, but it seems like there are more people losing connections and having slow, ( less then 10mb/s,) issues with the Synology units.

The QNAP "seems" more mac friendly. I need it to be both windows and mac friendly.

Am I barking up the wrong tree with both of these devices, or is it really just get one and see how well it works since they seem so similar?

I've had a similar all windows set-up for years with an old Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ that has run fine, but these seem so much more user friendly than Netgear's latest offerings.

Any thoughts?

 

[deconstruct60]

Yes it essentially makes it 25 machines pushing and pulling data at peak loads.

That is alot of clients for a machine which benchmarks peaks around 125MB/s (on single link). Even if you get perfect double up that is pretty high: 250/20 ==> 15MB/s. That's enough so that it is 10 seconds for a 150MB file. However, the HDD RAID likely to fade on 20 concurrent streams also. If you can get data on how well adding more memory helps smooth out fileserver service levels that would likely help separate the two.

Crashplan would be aimed at a backup of the NAS and would not be backing up Time Machine backups.

The TM backups are on the NAS. You can have Crashplan ignore those or maybe even segregate the TM backups into a different local volume from the "filesharing" volumes. As long as Crashplan "sees" the same logical volume then that should work.

The Thunderbolt adapter is still just 1000mbps.

Yes but it gives you two 1GbE ports. You can bond/aggregate those in OS X Server:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH8356

At this point evened out the 2 GbE port distinction. There is a price gap but it isn't because the "mini" can't.

I have one for my rMBP, but that is still a max of 125 MB/s, nowhere near the speed of the Pegasus.

The Pegasus cost is high when added to that of a mini.

That's why the dual-link aggregation of the QNAP and Synology are so appealing. Hopefully getting around 200MB/s.

Whether you get 200MB/s is going to also depend greatly on the switch in the middle between the Macs and NAS.

It is pretty straightforward to get a quad link out of Mini with some Thunderbolt additions. It just costs substantively more money.

A 1U enclosure so that pick up a full length PCI-e card slot.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html
( or cheaper http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpressse.html )

4 port card
http://www.small-tree.com/Quad_Port_Copper_PCI_e_Gigabit_Ethernet_Server_p/peg4l.htm

The bottleneck is still the network, not the HDD's in RAID.

If there are 20 clients pulling/pushing 20 different files, I wouldn't bet on that. RAID 0 , 10, 5, 50 , etc. is only going to hide only some HDD disk seek latency.

There are only 5 spindles here (on the HDDs). 20 concurrent users would mean they have the spindles outnumbered 4:1 . Unless you are going to expansion boxes to raise the number of spindles and segregate into different volumes with different RAID sets, they are likely to swamp the HDDs under peak load.

Pragmatically the NAS users are going to spread their open/save/close request out over time. It wouldn't last all day, but it seems likely there are going to certain times of the day where the NAS will "groan" under the load before the NAS users spread out their accesses into substantially less concurrent accesses.

Both the Ethernet and HDDs will hold up better because the "normal" load will be 2-3 concurrent active users with the rest "just logged in doing not much of anything". However, as approach saturating the Ethernet, it will also saturate the drives.

Am I barking up the wrong tree with both of these devices, or is it really just get one and see how well it works since they seem so similar?

As long as you are not wedded to putting all of the data into one shared volume it should work as long as the renders spend far more time rendering than they do reading/writing. If they are extremely active NAS users then it may present a problem.

If the load gets to high then perhaps the workload. For example, "originals and inputs" on one volume served by one of these devices and "outputs" on another one of these devices.

 

[sfxguy]

Thank you for that info. It is very helpfull.

So both the Synology and QNAP seem like the best choices still for my budget.
I still haven't heard if they have any issues with OSX or if I should look elsewhere.

Am what I reading bad about either of them just from people who have had issues with them and one is as good as the other or should I look for a different solution?

I am open to alternatives.