Is a Synology brand NAS any good for hosting a vault?

[gaulfinger]

One of my EVS engineers just ran the Asigra test on our newest DS-System (not yet in production). It's a 10TB system and got 516 files/sec and 257.562 MB/sec.

[gjovanovic]

So let me jump in here. QToss was refering to me a I am just implementing a Nexenta and replacing my Drobo. The underlying hardware is a SuperMicro server with 2 x 500 GB HD R1 for OS and then 10 x 2TB SAS 7.2K drives for data. I have built a backup volume made from 2 sets of 4 drives in a RaidZ1 (RAID5) which are then striped. The other two drive are to be used for another volume not related to backup. The server has 24 GB RAM and a single CPU (forget what the speed is). At this point there are no SSD or anything for caching. A pair of 1 Gb NIC agregated for redundancy.

I ran the Asigra IO test against it from my production DS-System (windows box) while it was not too busy doing backups to the Drobo. I got some "impressive" numbers to me escpecially in comparison to the Drobo.
With two threads I was able to:
Create files as fast as 380 files/sec
Read Full 72 MB/s (when using large 1 GB files)
Delete at 1600 files/sec

These numbers vary depending on the number of directories and files within the directories and the size of files.

I tried to run the same test set against the Drobo and stopped it after 50 minutes while it was still on the very first test (Nexenta took 9 minutes to complete it) which is the create test, I got 22 files/sec being created and 89 KB.sec (yes K not M). No point in continuing the test.

Hope this helps. I can try and give you other info if you are interested.

Goran

[Lasseoe]

One of my EVS engineers just ran the Asigra test on our newest DS-System (not yet in production). It's a 10TB system and got 516 files/sec and 257.562 MB/sec.

Which settings, just default "Create" ? Over NFS, CIFS, iSCSI or FC ?

[gaulfinger]

The connectivity behind the 516 files / 257MBps results is SAS attached, XFS file system. The default Create settings were bumped to include files from 1KB all the way to 10MB instead of just 100KB. It ran about 31 hours and generated 8.1TB of test data.

[Lasseoe]

Thank Gary!

Now I have something to compare against - it would actually be quite interesting to compile a database of various storage systems and how they perform using Asigra's IO benchmarking tool.
Although the tool itself does tell give you some numbers, it really depends a lot on exactly what the tool does behind the scenes, in case you want to compare with other tools.

[Jamesc]

We've just got our synology NAS up and running. They are seriously good units! Shall be interesting to see how they will perform under some testing but right now they are performing excellently!

[QStoss]

Yeah, I've heard really good things Jamesc - just the other day in a conversation.

[Jamesc]

We've just been running some read/write speed tests from our front end servers to our synology NAS and were getting about 800Mbps read/write at the moment, So very happy with that!

[eTegrity]

Qstos hi, a few things to consider, are Iops and capicity growth for your enviorment. First Iops if you are using Asigra Software there is a tool that will test your Iops on that equipment providing you can get a demo piece of hardware, we run Blue Arc shich is rated at up to 100,000 Iops depending onthe number of spindels your running, the more spindels (drives) the better faster your IOPS. That my friend I think is over kill for you.

We are now looking at expansion yet again and are looking at Compellant mainly because they ahve some great growth paths but you can start at what you need not what they want to sell you and all thier head servers or controllers as thier called work with the back end disk and here is trhe cool part you can mix Sata, Iscsi, SSD etc and it manages the data across all and stripes it across all spindels so you get the benefits of more spped for more spindels at less overhead cost.

That is a mouthful but I think they are worth checking out, Dell bought them for good reasona nd if you plan to grow I think you'll find them to be a good fit. I know of other partners using emc and very happy as well on the small side.
Best of Luck
Steve