Posted by ksec 4 hours ago
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
I'm guessing you're thinking Reolink or other Chinese ultra-commodity cam. It's fine, it's just in a different product class and ecosystem - and that's where enterprises fit in, they want that support+ecosystem and not DIYing.
Reolink CX820 8MP $129 https://reolink.com/product/cx820/
Unifi G6 8MP ~$300 https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/physical-security/uvc-g6-dome...
Avigilon H6A 8MP ~$1200 https://www.avigilon.com/security-cameras/h6a-dome
I think they're definitely not Avigilon, Genetec, Verkada, but we run a few hundred UI cams in some edge areas. It works, esp if you don't demand orchestration.
What's the comparison at $50-100?
(Seemingly rolled back recently, but a roll back can be easily rolled back itself. I don't trust them enough to count on that not happening.)
Do they have ecc on those models? Do you have an example model on hand?
They will at some point just cash out.
Boy I hope Broadcom didn’t hear that…
Once you invest thousands in network equipment or cameras you’re less likely to jump ship when they start sneaking things in. And this is long lived equipment, not the kind you anyway replace every couple of years. So that’s a relatively strong lock-in.
In my opinion, as long as the majority of their profits come from people continuing to buy the self-host devices, it is fairly unlikely they'll ever stop offering those devices. Why change a working business model?
Yes, subscription models are enticing for that recurring revenue... number must go up, right? /s
If a majority of your sales are not in subscription products though, I think it would be foolish for a business to blow off its own leg trying to chase that particular dragon.
Then again... businesses have made dumber calls in the past out of nowhere...
Does that make the rotting corpse of Twitter public again?
I've only been using Ubiquiti as a pro-sumer, but it has held up well for my use case of Plex and little game servers.
I use a Synology NAS for my storage though, which is a slightly beefier mobile AMD chipset.
I'd be very interested to know what I should and shouldn't expect from my ARM based network stack though!
Stay away from IPS and complicated firewall rules which usually are done in CPU, and you should be fine. HW acceleration for those (esp. TLS decryption) is a major reason fancy firewalls are very expensive. You're better off building an IDS or picking up a smaller FortiGate or Palo Alto firewall if you really want to get serious there.
1. My UDM Pro absolutely chokes and stalls with intrusion detection enabled on the firewall and 8 cameras connected. Network goes down, cameras disconnect, devices disconnect from Wi-Fi every time a car drives past a camera due to AI features triggering, etc.
For something meant for small businesses I wish they would just shove an Intel i5 or something in it. They make great switches, great APs, great everything else, just too stingy on processors on the few pieces of central equipment that people would actually be willing to spend more on.
And for a $3999 enterprise NAS with dual 25 Gbps SFP ports and 16 drives? It could surely use something more beefy than a Neoverse N2. I'd say an i7 or even i9 is warranted here.
3. The UNAS 8 I don't own but I believe it would struggle with >1Gbps links and encryption enabled
I dont mind using ARM for NAS, but (to be fair I have not looked in a while) the issue is they tend to not have many pcie lanes. Looks like the N2 can have up to 64 @pcie5 so if it's built well, I don't think the CPU will be too much of a bottleneck.
Hell I'll put it out there - some company should make a NAS-specific ARM chip line to make lines of way less expensive (well pre the current troubles) base NAS enclosures with lots of NVMe etc.
It's even underpowered for streaming -- I found Protect to be extremely laggy, taking often 30+ seconds to open the camera stream when 3-4 stream receivers were connected.
I have a udm se, 10 g3 cams, 4k bullet+ai, door entry + cam +ai, couple of the display viewports running all day and a nano hd access point and symmetric gig with intrusion etc turned on. I also have wireguard users connecting in remotely.
No problems with performance whatsoever at this point.
Ok its not enterprisy its just a small business with 20 people but seems fine to me. I run synology servers.
This is worse with the older devices.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4yKf044meY
https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Gateway-Intrusion-D...
The ENAS looks like fairly nice hardware. It even has ECC RAM. Not cheap, though.
Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing.
Instead I just threw up my hands and replaced all the spinning disks with NVMe drives for the data I actually shared (8x 4TB NVMe drives.) And now it very usable and no need for LRArc, etc. Random or streaming access is equally fast.
Best choice I made. Now I did do this over a year ago so I skipped the NVMe price inflation.
I still keep 4 spinning disks but it is for archival data that I expect to never access unless something bad happens. It is slow and I use it like a tape drive.
Honestly, outside of random access/small file access, my primary NVMe ZFS server isn't all that much faster in raw throughput - despite being 22x NVMe drives going direct to the CPU instead of 8 HDDs going through a SATA controller. I think it's easier to hit other bottlenecks with ZFS/network transfers well before the disk throughput itself. E.g., enabling jumbo frames for NFS did still give me a decent perf/efficiency bonus.
https://www.fs.com/c/25g-sfp28-3215
But no, spinning disks won't saturate it, even if you were doing 100% sequential reads.
(I originally said fill it with NVMe - I was wrong)
Looking at the specs: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products...
Hard Drive Capacity
(16) 2.5/3.5" HDD / SSD support
(2) M.2 NVMe SSD support
(2) Expansion ports support
I think you're right we only get two SSDs on NVME as the cache, but it looks like we can run the rest (16) as SATA SSDs, which is often fine if you primarily care about random IOPS and capacity over pure throughput.
Would you consider that a dealbreaker?
There can easily be a bottleneck depending on how the setup the sata/sas, but if you can get sustained sequential reads or writes, 16x drives at 6 Gbps sata should be able to saturate 2x 25 Gbps ethernet. The store link shows two expansion ports as well which should help get bandwidth to the point where 25 Gbps is useful.
Less likely with random reads/writes or mixed use.
$3999
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1618911-REG/synology_...
I laughed.
Edit: Drives are not included :(
(Not that you need that much for canceling streaming, I’d get a home Synology or diy TrueNAS for that anyway)
Seems like a nice, basic, affordable platform for workgroup/SME stuff. Not NetApp/Pure Storage "enterprise" grade though.
It is a large reason they can mitigate vendor risk IMHO, offering different tiers of switches as an example without being held hostage by on particular switch IC vendor like many brands.
I do wish someone would take up comstar though, netapp bought and killed several jbod lines etc… to kill it before Oracle bought Sun and also killed it to protect their enterprise storage offerings.
NVMe-oF may be a possibility because there are FPGA IP vendors but without comstar there are some challenges IMHO.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
For that use case I recommend UNas from ugreen or the minis forum ryzen Ai stuff.
The segment UI and Synology are in are 10x more than the minisforum, beelink, qnap, cwwk type devices, but still 1/10 of the price of getting started in enterprise gear from HPe, Dell, Pure, etc.
There ARE licensing issues related to shipping it compiled into the kernel, but you can install it as a kernel module on every mainline distro nowadays which is functionally the same from a user perspective.
As a consequence, you don't necessarily want a rolling distro, as the ZFS module can get out of sync with the kernel.
ZFS itself is build for both BSD and Linux from the same source, so there's feature parity there.