Considering a big departure from typical enterprise storage vendors for our video post production house. We’re currently on a NetApp FAS and considering the move to TruNas Scale or Synology SA, HD, or FS series. No experience with Synology or TruNAS in a high availability SMB environment. Can either of these solutions be trusted to get close to our match NetApp/Dell/HP/Qumulo in performance or reliability? Big win is going to be upfront cost and support cost. Thoughts?
We sell at lot of TrueNAS M Series unit to the movie industry. So that answer is yes for TrueNAS but for Synology we have not deployed at the same scale so that is less tested but that really depends on at what scale you are referring to.
Lots of random reads, very hard to predict the assets that will be required even day to day. 3 to 4 Adobe Premiere editors with Media Encoder exports. 5x video transcoders prores LT/HQ masters to MPEG2/4. IOPs at the high point of 5000 and an average of 500-600 IOPs. Throughput peaks at flooding 10Gbps and is a constant of 400-500 MBps. 15-20 team members.
NetApp performance has been solid but it’s time to explore a more open hardware compatibility platform. Hybrid array solutions would be best, M Series looks like it might fit. Synology seemed appealing because of virtual DSM and to my understanding it could replace the functionality of SVM on NetApp. Identity (AD) and network segmented storage is a compliance requirement. To my knowledge, multiple VLANs are not possible on a base instance of either DSM or TruNAS. Could be wrong.
I have never tested virtual DSM but TrueNAS has no issues with multiple VLANs and can be built to maintain high iops under load.
I wonder why it’s never mentioned in any reviews that the Synology disk encryption is practically useless. It has a maximum file name length limitation which varies depending on the language used to label files (unless they changed that in recent years) and what’s even worse you can simply gain admin access (and decrypt the drives) by pressing the physical reset button on the appliance. So there’s virtually no protection from burglars stealing the NAS from your office even when you have the encryption turned on.
The two things that made me return the NAS 2 days after testing it. I wonder why this is NEVER mentioned in the reviews of Synology NASes? You only find that info in the fine print in the manual (which no one reads of course).
So in that regard it’s unusable if you are concerned about theft.
That said: I tested one probably 3 years back so maybe this has improved now?
If you want to protect the data from physical theft on TrueNAS or a Synology you need to use passphrase for the folder on Synology or Dataset on TrueNAS. Using keys that are kept on the device is not a great for either device as there are ways to extract them. Using a passphrase mitigates this issue for both platforms.
