I don't have 2.5GBE in my house yet and I've never plugged anything USB into my NAS so for users like me it's fine and I can see why they didn't put these expensive sockets into the NAS. My 218 is also still fine so I'm not going to buy a 220 anyway I'm just curious about how things are progressing.
Just adding a little balance to the OMG no this no that posts!
When the Cloud started to take off I realised I was about to lose my on-prem Windows server and Exchange server customers. I bought the QNAP as a punt with my own money, to see whether a NAS could fill the centralised shared storage and LAN infrastructure gaps at a more acceptable cost. I was already hand crafting Linux servers but the time involved is difficult to sell on to budget conscious small business customers.Originally Posted by Saracen999
The first time I spent a customer's money on a NAS there was a VMWare requirement. Of the devices I short-listed the Synology had the VMWare certification and the QNAP did not. Working with the Synology turned out to be more intuitive and instilled more confidence than I got from the QNAP. I've spent my own money on Synology ever since. It's interesting to watch the generally negative reaction of our technicians when I make them use the QNAP.
Confidence is difficult to quantify but when you are personally responsible for supporting the solutions you sell it is pretty vital. Confidence to meet a customer requirement faster, completely and right first time. Confidence the underlying packages have been properly ported and tested. Confidence a show-stopping bug or lengthy research is less likely. Confidence a customer will not find a requirement gap the device can't fill. One of the challenges of small business customers is they often lack the technical skills and knowledge to ask for what they need, until they realise they don't have it.
Synology. No question. To be clear. Synology and QNAP are both selling turn-key Linux servers. A network application Swiss Army knife without the hassle of crafting configuration files in Vi (or whatever). I just happen to think that _overall_ Synology make a better job of it than QNAP do.If you were buying that lot right now, which way would you go?
For outright performance of one particular task or requirement, I wouldn't choose either Synology or QNAP. We recently hit a bottleneck with one of our customer processes and are hand crafting a storage server to overcome it. The system will cost a fraction of buying a Synology or QNAP with sufficient performance. The SMB throughput should be stunning but that is all it will do.
What I would say is, if you bought a QNAP or a Synology you are unlikely to be disappointed. To get 'the best [1]' out of either you would benefit from some net-ops and infra-ops skills. If you bought the QNAP and asked me to set up and support it for you, I would thank you for the the job but wish you had bought the Synology. Hope that makes some sense.And given your experience, would you think Synology (and I was at 220j, 220 Play sand now 220+, already) is the right direction for me?
[1] The point and click wizards render a minimally working device.
Saracen999 (13-09-2020)
@matts
Yes,, that makes "some sense" but complete sense. It is a far more insightful view than I can conceivably get from just reading online reviews, because it's not just X processor versus Y RAM size sort of thing. Also, I get both the caveats about getting "the best" and the reference to what that is being very dependent on what it's needed for.
I've done some of the same sort of thing, supplying and supporting customers who don't really know what they need, but all but the dumbest usually have a pretty Good idea of what they need it to do. I've also been on the receiving end of not having thought that through. I spent quite a bit of time back in the days of various different standards of 'personal' computer slowly melding into more or less IBM-compatible and DOS (then Windows) or Apple, "consulting" on people that ran a business (be it induranc broking, doubke-glazing sales, a dentist's practice, or whatever, blending my business and accountancy background with IT knowledge. Most of those businesses knew what they needed to do, and the consultancy bit was largely getting them to think that through. After all, as I pointed out, I don't know their business, and if they tell me they need to solve problems A, B and C, I can tell them the what, how, etc. But if the then turn round and add previously unmentioned X, Y and Z, then at a minimum it's likely to cost more, and may well be that they bought the wrong solution by stipulating A, B and C.
I get exactly where you're coming from, and your comments were precisely the insightful view I was hoping for. Thanks. Lots.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
Usually, a general purpose solution is good enough for mosst people, most of the time, but a scalpel isn't the right knife for a chef, and a chef's filleting knife isn't the right knife isn't right for a surgeon. Come to think of it, the filleting knife isn't even right for the chef if he's trying to butcher a side of pork.
The Swiff knife of NAS solutions is right for me, but it implicit in that is that it's spec'd to be a decent solution for a vast array of user needs, which means I'm paying for stuff I don't need, in order to get the bits I do need in as simple and out-of-the-box way as I can.
Oh, and any business owner that does need a "hand-crafted server" is likely to find it far cheaper to pay a specialist, and spend their time cheffing, or surgeoning, or selling double-glazing, etc. If you need a guard dog, buy a guard dog, rather than barking yourself, as it were.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
Yes, when the NAS is accessing a single large file sequentially and doing nothing else. Any sort of random or concurrent access is going to hammer throughput from a low power CPU running software RAID.
Historically the Plus in a Synology model name indicated the presence of an AES co-processor. As far as I know the latest models all do hardware AES. The Plus remains for marketing purposes (IMO) and denotes DSM is feature complete - You get the VM, containerisation and multi-tenant functionality whether the CPU and RAM are realistically up to it or not.
I've got just shy of 1000 mixed home and small business customers on my books. My previous business was strictly B2B projects and accrued 500 small businesses, alongside a dozen or so corporates from my vendor and contracting days. The number that could make a cost/benefit for > 1Gbe outside a server room backbone, I can count on one hand.
The typical micro and small business requirements I am familiar with prioritise multi-user, multi-use, redundancy, security, reliability and budget above raw throughput. There are of course exceptions, such as content creators moving to 4K.
Oh how I laughed(!)
The larger models have backup and virtual infrastructure use cases in server rooms and DCs already invested in 10Gbe backbones.the thing is that even the 5, 8 and 12 bay models don't come with 2.5G as standard. They do have pcie expansion at least but that's not exactly a cheap thing to upgrade.
Yes it's a negative, if you want your NAS to do only one thing at once for one device, and LAGs and jumbo frames and a community developed USB to 5Gbe driver won't cut it, and you are too tight to stump up for a faster processor and the optional 10Gbe card. But that is a really, really narrow niche.If this was the non plus or the J model I/we'd have no issue with the lack of 2.5G connection but when their main competitors, sometimes even cheaper, are starting to fit 2.5G as standard, the fact they haven't added one is a negative.
Because, you are trading outside the technology sector with a few employees and partners. You want a centralised active backup process, remote working, Extranet, Edge and the other technology facilities your larger competitors take for granted. The challenge is to deliver those facilities within a relatively tiny cash flow, at a small fraction of the price those larger competitors spend. You have no need to transfer huge files across the LAN. You prefer not to be an early adopter, due to the risk and disproportionate impact of interop issues on an infrastructure device.
A pretty common small business use case, I would say.
Business use case? It's a consumer NAS.
There's quite an overlap between consumer and small/home business user, though. "Consumer" devices also have a benefit for such small (very small) businesses, mainly in that they expect (and typically get) very little in the way of computer expertise in the business.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
waves
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