QNAP or Synology?

Vertigo · 14 Feb 2015 at 23:37

Looking to upgrade a QNAP TS-459 Pro and wondering which way to jump.

The QNAP is used solely as an iSCSI device and I've been generally happy with it although it does have some functionality limitations. Now looking for something with more capacity and a bit more "poke" and the obviously choices are the QNAP TS-853 Pro and the Synology DS1815+.

I've read the respective reviews on Anandtech and there doesn't seem to be much in it although the Synology seems to have a slight edge when it comes to iSCSI flexibility and performance.

Just wondering if anyone has experience of these devices (or similar) and wanted to offer their opinion/advice

Caged · 15 Feb 2015 at 00:09

iSCSI for what? What's your workload, what environment is it going into?

Vertigo · 15 Feb 2015 at 13:54

General data storage for virtual machines, stuff like Exchange databases, WSUS updates, SVN repositories, that kind of stuff. Also general file storage which is shared out via a server VM.

Workload isn't that high tbh, we're a company of only circa 40 people, just looking to upgrade to something with a bit of spare capacity & oomph which will last a good few years. Both the mentioned devices are more than adequate for our needs, was just wondering if anyone had had any specific experiences with either brand which would recommend them (or otherwise).

Caged · 15 Feb 2015 at 14:15

Use neither if you're putting critical VM workloads onto them, they are prosumer hardware and the support offerings of both are pretty dire.

I'd use them for archive data or a test environment, no chance would I put Exchange on these sorts of boxes.

Rroff · 15 Feb 2015 at 14:23

^^ They are ok for non high end enterprise use aslong as you take appropriate steps to backup your data (i.e. no relying on internal RAID for anything other than uptime convenience) and understanding the caveats in regard to support and that kind of thing.

I've set up a few for smaller businesses (which otherwise would still be sharing USB sticks and practises like that) and they are still running solid years on with a fair amount of abuse and bad habits/practises.

The choice really comes down to which of the 2 you prefer the software approach, neither is specifically better or worse, sometimes you might find only one or the other has the specific feature you need.

Personally I prefer QNAP as their approach is more intuitive to me and they seem less inclined for style over substance - Synology seem a bit more "with" the app generation and more flashy feature support.

Vertigo · 16 Feb 2015 at 09:12

They're not "prosumer" at all, they're targeted at SMBs which is exactly what we are. We can't afford top-end enterprise SAN kit as the prices are stupid and it's overkill for our requirements.

All data on them is backed up, usually at hourly intervals so if it fails it's not a massive problem. They're simply used to separate data from the VMs so the latter are easily moved/restored to a different host in the event of hardware failure.

We've had our Exchange database on the TS-459 for around five years and have never had any problems with resilience or performance.

Caged · 16 Feb 2015 at 19:51

You asked for advice, I gave you it. The products and the support that is offered by the respective companies is not good enough to run Exchange on, unless you have SLAs measured in days.

SMB SAN is stuff like the Dell MD3 series, HP MSA 2040, NetApp FAS2520, IBM V3700 etc.

blueboy2001 · 16 Feb 2015 at 23:28

We've got around 10 Synology devices from the 214 series right up to an RS3614RPxs with 32TB usable.

None of them have given us any real problems and they're a breeze to configure.

However, we don't use them for critical production data or anything where if the device was unavailable for a week it would cause us major operational problems - because potentially that's how long faulty hardware can take to be replaced. In most cases if one died I'd probably just buy a new one and transplant the disks. They claim next day advanced replacement on their top end devices now, but that's only once the issue is confirmed by support. There's no SLA on support, so if they take 5 days to get back to you you're stuck.

The other issue is the frequent patches required. Most have some sort of security element so we have to apply them. This means around 10 minutes downtime quite frequently - a couple of times a month recently. This is not a problem for our use cases because it's no bother to bounce them during the day and the updates install with 1 click, but if you're running Exchange on it this may be an issue.

stringsonfire · 4 Mar 2015 at 20:28

I set up a 1515+ last weekend. Very impressed by the feature-set and ease of use.

blueboy2001 · 6 Mar 2015 at 20:43

I had cause to open a support ticket with Synology. I couldn't log in to the web interface because a log file had filled up the system partition.

I got a response - after 8 days! The response told me I need to make Telnet access to the device available on a public IP address before they can help me.

I've told them there's no way I'm making access to the device available using a plain text protocol over the Internet.

I've fixed it myself for now, but I don't want this to happen again.

oli356 · 6 Mar 2015 at 22:28

blueboy2001 said:
I had cause to open a support ticket with Synology. I couldn't log in to the web interface because a log file had filled up the system partition.

I got a response - after 8 days! The response told me I need to make Telnet access to the device available on a public IP address before they can help me.

I've told them there's no way I'm making access to the device available using a plain text protocol over the Internet.

I've fixed it myself for now, but I don't want this to happen again.

I'm sure they would have been fine with using SSH...

Dogers · 6 Mar 2015 at 22:57

blueboy2001 said:
I got a response - after 8 days! The response told me I need to make Telnet access to the device available on a public IP address before they can help me.

If you buy their "Large Scale Business" models (IE, anything with an "xs" in the model number), they'll ship you an entire new unit within a day or so. You swap the disks and restore config (you do have a backup, right?) and ship the broken one back at their expense.

Or alternatively, if you're really worried about issues, use their new HA system with two units.

Caged · 7 Mar 2015 at 01:11

Their HA isn't worthy of that description.

If you want a properly supported product then you don't buy Synology. They are great little boxes for many situations, but you need to know when not to use them.

Edit: To expand on the above: https://ukdl.synology.com/download/Document/WhitePaper/Synology_SHA_White_Paper.pdf

The dictionary definition of High Availability:

In information technology, high availability refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time. Availability can be measured relative to "100% operational" or "never failing."

The Synology definition of High Availability:

Note: When a switchover occurs, all existing sessions are terminated. A graceful shutdown of the sessions is not
possible, and some data loss may occur; however, retransmission attempts should be handled at a higher level to
avoid loss. Please note that if the file system created on an iSCSI LUN by your application cannot handle unexpected
session terminations, the application might not be able to mount the iSCSI LUN after a failover occurs.

4.3 Switchover Limitations
Switchover cannot be initiated in the following situations:
 DSM Update: When installing DSM updates, all services will be stopped and then come online after DSM
update installation is completed.

You cannot read Synology's sales literature about their features and assume that everything you know about how the rest of the industry uses those terms also applies here. They are inexpensive NAS appliances to be used in small business environments or as backup targets. If you use them for anything else then be prepared to defend your decisions. Having to shutdown all VMs using a Synology HA cluster once every two or three weeks to update DSM to fix numerous security issues does not sound like an HA product in my book.

blueboy2001 · 8 Mar 2015 at 14:56

Dogers said:
If you buy their "Large Scale Business" models (IE, anything with an "xs" in the model number), they'll ship you an entire new unit within a day or so. You swap the disks and restore config (you do have a backup, right?) and ship the broken one back at their expense.

Or alternatively, if you're really worried about issues, use their new HA system with two units.

The device concerned is a RS3614RPXS. As Caged said, HA is a waste of time.

I am well aware of the above "promise" on their website, but I've no faith they'd follow through on it after this experience and in any case that's only any good if you've got a failed device - it doesn't help if you've hit a software bug as I appeared to have done.

Having a "large business" device doesn't seem to bump you up the queue in terms of requests for assistance with software issues.

Lessons learned: Always enable SSH (I had done) so you can initiate a clean reboot of the device on the command line if you can't get in to the web interface.

On the plus side, whilst I couldn't access the web interface, at no time was file access affected.

Dogers · 8 Mar 2015 at 16:37

Caged said:
Their HA isn't worthy of that description.

If you want a properly supported product then you don't buy Synology. They are great little boxes for many situations, but you need to know when not to use them.

Oh I know that, we've got all sorts of storage at work, from old FC SANs to NetApps to Synologys. I agree I wouldn't use them for anything as critical as Exchange, but the HA offering is better than nothing if it's all you can afford.

blueboy2001 said:
I am well aware of the above "promise" on their website, but I've no faith they'd follow through on it after this experience and in any case that's only any good if you've got a failed device - it doesn't help if you've hit a software bug as I appeared to have done.

They do - we recently had a RS10613xs+ which broke due to some environmental power issues. Once we'd confirmed proof of purchase, we had a replacement next day.

Caged · 8 Mar 2015 at 16:56

Dogers said:
the HA offering is better than nothing if it's all you can afford.

It's at best a false sense of security and the naming of it is very badly thought out. I would suggest that your experience with Synology isn't a result of having to contact them within the last six months or so. Hardware failure is very rare in any case, so even if they still do next-day replacement for dead hardware, it doesn't help that the support that you might actually need such as when you have intermittent issues or software bugs can take two business days between responses to make any progress - you're looking at two weeks just to work through a few suggestions.

As with everything, you get what you pay for - these units are many times cheaper than 'proper' storage, so to expect the hardware, software, and support to be anything like the big guys is misguided. Buyer beware and all that.

My advice to anybody in IT is that if you can't afford to do something properly, then don't do it. I don't mean be confrontational about the whole thing, but if you're having to scrape funds together and you end up with Exchange running on out-of-warranty servers and Synology storage then it was your job at the start of the process to push the decisions makers towards Google Apps or Office 365 or whatever equivalent services exist. Not having the money to do something properly shouldn't mean that you feel pressured into doing it badly, with the funding gap made up with your own unpaid overtime or unnecessary stress. I accept that not everybody is in that position, but at least if people know they are doing things wrong it's a better place to be in than jumping headfirst into building a critical service on top of something that you aren't in a position to offer any guarantees on, convinced that they know something that the guys trying to sell them expensive enterprise products don't. If you want living proof of this then read the Spiceworks forum, it's pretty much the definition of the blind leading the blind.

Randall8686 · 9 Mar 2015 at 12:44

Synology's Customer service is to be frank. Shocking !

It was nearly acceptable a few years back when they offered a UK support phone number however i emailed them with a Bug and it took 11 days for them to reply and then over a month to patch it. I ended up ditching the synology box to one side and using another device as a fill in.

I would not put any faith in them helping you out when you most need them.

Rroff · 9 Mar 2015 at 13:13

Caged said:
It's at best a false sense of security and the naming of it is very badly thought out. I would suggest that your experience with Synology isn't a result of having to contact them within the last six months or so. Hardware failure is very rare in any case, so even if they still do next-day replacement for dead hardware, it doesn't help that the support that you might actually need such as when you have intermittent issues or software bugs can take two business days between responses to make any progress - you're looking at two weeks just to work through a few suggestions.

As with everything, you get what you pay for - these units are many times cheaper than 'proper' storage, so to expect the hardware, software, and support to be anything like the big guys is misguided. Buyer beware and all that.

My advice to anybody in IT is that if you can't afford to do something properly, then don't do it. I don't mean be confrontational about the whole thing, but if you're having to scrape funds together and you end up with Exchange running on out-of-warranty servers and Synology storage then it was your job at the start of the process to push the decisions makers towards Google Apps or Office 365 or whatever equivalent services exist. Not having the money to do something properly shouldn't mean that you feel pressured into doing it badly, with the funding gap made up with your own unpaid overtime or unnecessary stress. I accept that not everybody is in that position, but at least if people know they are doing things wrong it's a better place to be in than jumping headfirst into building a critical service on top of something that you aren't in a position to offer any guarantees on, convinced that they know something that the guys trying to sell them expensive enterprise products don't. If you want living proof of this then read the Spiceworks forum, it's pretty much the definition of the blind leading the blind.

I think your advice is sound however... I both agree and disagree with it - if your company would be depending on QNAP or Synology for any kind of SLA or day to day support then yeah buying into them would be very misguided - I certainly wouldn't dump and run such a NAS on a business - but I don't think that is the whole story - for a smaller business if you've got people on site/payroll who have the knowledge and keep the setup properly backed up and easily migratable with a failover solution in place (taking into account that the NAS might be completely unrecoverable and/or "unreplaceable") I don't really see the problem.

EDIT: End of the day even the biggest and best of companies can go under unexpectedly regardless of the level of SLA or support you'd be mad to have a critical system in place without a managed plan for its complete failure both hardware and external support wise.