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QNAP 459U-RP: first impressions

I recently added a dedicated storage box to my lab environment. After a week these are my first impressions:

Pro:
  • Small. I needed a shallow rack-mountable device, and this one is perfect, only about 50cm deep.
  • Fast. I knew that a NAS device like this wouldn't be the speed king of the storage world, but I'm pleasantly surprised.
  • Open software. It runs Linux, you get SSH access to your device, and you can add packages if you want. Evidently, I added tools like dstat to keep an eye on things.
  • Compatibility. Used it from Windows Vista, VMware vSphere, and Linux (CentOS and others). No problems at all.
  • Cheap. I could have gone for an EMC Symmetrix instead, but decided against it :-)
Con:
  • Fragile. Just a bit. The SATA ports of the disk drives slide directly in sata plugs inside the device. I hope I won't have to re-plug drives all too often.
  • Not all operations happen online. QNAP advertises RAID1 to RAID5 migration, and it does that, by using one of the mirrored drives and the new drive to build the RAID5 array, then moving the data from the broken mirror to the incomplete RAID5 array. You'll be seeing a different filesystem after the data move.
  • Robustness. One of the four drives I bought with the device (WDC-something-FYPS SATA disks) was DOA. The QNAP refused to use the slot that was occupied by the faulty drive, until after a power cycle.
  • Bugs. All software has bugs, and this version of the firmware has a bug in the iSCSI configuration wizard. I'll put my VMs on NFS for now...
  • No VLAN tagging support. I've got a separate IP storage VLAN, and to see the QNAP on both the regular LAN and the IP storage VLAN, I need to use one interface per VLAN. Why not support VLAN trunking ? The 8021q driver is already in the QNAP software, but the vconfig utility isn't, and the web interface would need to support it as well.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Bert, this is a good buy. Not as powerful as an EMC Symmetrix though :)

I've just bought an Intel X25-M to put in my TS-459... I expect crazy perf!

Cheers,
Didier
27/6/10 18:45
Bert de Bruijn said…
Firmware 3.3.0 solved my problem with the iSCSI config wizard.
And BTW, I have an Intel X25-M in the Linux PC I used for storage before I had the qnap. 1Gbps iSCSI is clearly the bottleneck there...
3/7/10 14:28
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