10 Gig Network Overhaul

ace2109

ace2109

ace2109

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Hey guys,
I am looking at the possibilities of upgrading our network in work to 10 gigabit to allow our editors to work faster with footage. I have a full Ubiquiti network setup at home and I wanted to use as much of this gear as possible in this new project, however, the lack of a 10 Gig RJ45 switch has me stumped and im hoping you guys can tell me if this setup will work.

I would like to install x2 Unifi 24 Port POE Gigabit switches, a new Unifi Gateway and connect these and our 10 Gig Synology DS1819+ together with a Unifi 10 Gigabit Switch. My thought behind this is to use the SFP ports to connect the switches, gateway and the Synology together, while using the x4 RJ45 ports to connect to local workstation via Cat6. I will also have a Cloud key (Gen 2) and a few wifi access points dotted about.

Our editors won't be editing directly from the Synology, as they only use Proxy media at this stage. They do however connect and render out the final project using the files located on the server. I also want to use a 10 gig connection for ingesting footage as our camera operators come back from filming, this should improve our network speed overall.

Our current network is made up of old networking gear, including Draytek, HP, Netgear and TP-Link. I want to use this time and budget to completely upgrade our entire network, including wifi, while allowing the possibility of future expansion.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on this and any recommendations are welcome.
 

ChrisD.

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Just get some compatible DACs to connect the switch to the NAS, they're about £25 each rather than buying the RJ45 connectors, that is if the NAS has SFP+ ports?
 

Avalon

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Mikrotik do a small 4 port 10Gb SFP+ switch from memory for not a lot of money, but have you given much thought to the real world benefits?

Have you checked that the Atom C3538 and mechanical drives will manage anything like the claimed 656MB/s write speed with multiple users accessing the pool and doing r/w? I have a nasty feeling it’s going to struggle as 10Gb can be pretty demanding in CPU terms and mechanical drives don’t usually like doing multiple r/w operations at the same time - multiple users writing out to them and say another one reading could get quite painful. It looks like you might be able to mitigate that by using the NVMe cache feature, but once that fills up, I would suspect things will slow quite dramatically.
 
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ace2109

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I was planning on upgrading the RAM to 16Gb and installing a 2TB cache in the Synology to help with speed. This will mainly be used by a 2 10gig workstation with the possiblity of a third coming later.

We wont be using it to edit from though, we will only reconnect to render out final projects after the proxy version is signed off.
 

Avalon

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2TB of decent NVMe and assuming your clients won't fill it before it's written out to the array and that atom CPU isn't a huge bottleneck (the official 656MB/s suggests it may be), then you should see an improvement, but that improvement is not going to be in the region of moving things 10x faster and may not scale that well for multiple concurrent users writing to the array.

Linus did a video a while back, the only way to realistically get anything near optimum results was fast CPU+NVMe or ideally RAM disk, if you just want to bump speeds and are happy with a few gigabit vs the one you have now (realistically a decent benefit for an inexpensive upgrade), then go for it. If you want near line speed performance, you likely have the wrong NAS.
 

ChrisD.

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Unfortunately Synology always seem to skimp on CPU, QNAP equivalents are much better and it shows when you start using 10Gb.
 

ace2109

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From a quick look, it looks like the QNAP may be the way to go as you guys say. Have you any experience with the software on it? This will be used as a simple file server, however I was planning on buying two of the same NAS and using the second as a backup to the first! Synologys backup software allows you to backup to another NAS and use it like a sort of time machine to the first, is there anything like this on the QNAP?

The pricing seems similar to the Synology after you add hard drives etc so if you guys are saying we will see a better utilisation of the 10gig connection then It must be the right move.
 

Avalon

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ChrisD. said:
Unfortunately Synology always seem to skimp on CPU, QNAP equivalents are much better and it shows when you start using 10Gb.
Click to expand...

Most ‘off the shelf consumer’ (read expensive toy) NAS device’s are overpriced and woefully under specified for what you get, they have quietly upgraded the feature set to a home server, but by the time you’re at that stage, you’re usually well into the self build/commercial server requirements stage. This is why device’s like a microserver are often better buys for a home/small SMB set-up and if you need more then a dedicated conventional server makes sense.

Personally for this kind of usage i’d be considering a Xeon, ECC RAM, NVMe cache pool and an array with multiple parity drive in UnRAID and rsync to a second NAS (the Synology for example) and depending on the WAN connectivity something like GSuite for off-site. I’m sure someone else will suggest FreeNAS or whichever derivative hasn’t offended people this week.
 
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ace2109

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Avalon said:
Most ‘off the shelf consumer’ (read expensive toy) NAS device’s are overpriced and woefully under specified for what you get, they have quietly upgraded the feature set to a home server, but by the time you’re at that stage, you’re usually well into the self build/commercial server requirements stage. This is why device’s like a microserver are often better buys for a home/small SMB set-up and if you need more then a dedicated conventional server makes sense.

Personally for this kind of usage i’d be considering a Xeon, ECC RAM, NVMe cache pool and an array with multiple parity drive in UnRAID and rsync to a second NAS (the Synology for example) and depending on the WAN connectivity something like GSuite for off-site.
Click to expand...

This would be awesome, however, we don’t have a dedicated person looking after our network, Synology worked perfectly for the past 5 years, which is why I was looking at it as an option again. Having been recommended the QNAP now though, it seems like a great step up to utilise the 10 gig network. As we grow, the aim would be to put a larger setup in place but this upgrade would drastically improve our current setup.
 

Avalon

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You don’t need an IT person, much as your Synology works with minimal intervention (please do the security updates, because you know, they are actually important), one of my UnRAID boxes was flawless for well over a year without so much as a reboot. It only got rebooted to update the OS eventually. Either way if 656MB/s for a single user and a 2TB cap will work for your workflow, then this could be a decent upgrade compared to the network speed you have now, question is how fast can each box output rendered video? If they are limited to 200MB/s for example it’s a moot point at this stage.
 

neil_g

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You may want to do a bit of research, I seem to remember reading there wasn't much love for unifi switches in enterprise and/or poor support.

I haven't got any direct experience with their switching (I do of their WiFi in enterprise and find it a bit "meh" ) but wouldn't be my first choice for switching personally.
 
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