Blazingly FAST 25 gigabit Over Network! - Synology 3400d Review ft. Kioxia PM7 SAS SSDs

yeah just casually dropping two three gigabytes per second over the network that's what the sonology sa 3400d dual controller it's basically table Stakes at this point to get a Windows machine to talk to the network at 25 gigabit which is kind of mind-blowing that we've come that far it doesn't need a special Network or different packet sizes or anything like that it's basically plug-and play let me show you how with this anology Nas is it really Nas it's Enterprise grade it's it's different than other nases let's take a closer [Music] look it's practically portable sa 3400d D for dual controller that's pretty obvious when you look at the back there's two sets of ports for everything this is one of the Zeon D compute modules basically a computer inside you can see that we've got four ddr4 dim slots for ECC U dims that's unregistered air correcting memory in the base configuration you've got 8 GB per node in a single dim which is surprisingly capable for storage applications I've also added the sonology 25 gbit dual Port Nix so two 25 gig connections a total of 50 gig in addition each one of these has a single 10 gig port and dual 1 gig ports we'll talk more about those in a second because you can do creative uses so this single node has five connections to the network you can see here we have our SATA discon module so there's a little bit of local storage here but this isn't really directly user accessible this is really just for configuration and sonology stuff we've got serial attached scuzzy interfaces here and there is one extra SAS port at the rear for connecting a dis expansion shelf so each one of these nodes has that connection there's also an rs232 serial Port because everything Enterprise has to have an rs232 serial Port right and that's pretty much it right we've got our tiny little xon D processor in the middle here but uh like I say it is a surprisingly capable platform right now I'm using the kioxia pm7 SAS flash discs these are not on the Soni QV at the time I'm recording this verified vendor list but check that from sonology and if you'd like to see these drives added sonology is adding nonology drives to the quality control list there a little bit of a controversy a Kur fuffle if you will because sonology has sonology branded drives and some folks were saying wait a minute if you only can use sonology branded drives in the sonology platform suddenly this isn't as good of a deal because I can't just go out and buy Samsung drives well that's not the case with with the sa 3400d you can buy nonology Samsung drives they're just drives that should be tested like the pm1643 the 1633 I tested that that's not on the qvl and so you get a warning it works anyway but you do get a warning whereas the 1643 has no warning and works anyway everything is green across the board even though that is not a sonology drive it's very important to understand this you know credit where credit is due don't you know Venture spleen because it's like oh it doesn't work with a anology drive no it totally does it even works with people that are doing stuff way off in left field like me but this is a good serial attached scuzzy Drive incidentally serial attached scuzzy SAS is part of the magic of how sonology does this you see you you really only got three options four kinds of drives you can do SATA you could do serial attached sky and you can do nvme and coincidentally enough this is arranged in also the performance class SATA tops out at about 600 megabytes per second kyia drives those are SAS 24 so that's 24 gigabit it's pretty fast on a per Drive basis and then you've got envme which for pcie Gen 4 is 8 gigabytes per second or 32 gabit electrically there is actually a fair bit of difference between SATA and SAS a lot of people are aware that you can use a SATA drive with as SAS controller meaning that on most sonology stuff you can plug plated disc in and it'll work and that sort of stuff the difference is that serial attached scuzzy as a connector and standard can have what's called dual porting which means that there's two different connections on this connector that can go to two different controllers you see where this is going got your serial attached scuzzy drives that can have two connections to two machines and that's how this Chassis Works that's how they do it at a relatively low cost envme for their part there are some chassis out there that will take the four pcie lanes that this supports and split it into two ports of two lanes uh that's not widely actually standardized it's kind of sort of standardized but not exactly I've got some Intel optain drives that do that but nobody ever really figured out how to do dual porting correctly with nvme instead what the industry does now is they do even lower cost equipment but you just have physically more of it so you have a very lowc cost chassis that has practically no redundancy in the same chassis but you have multiple copies basically of that chassis what that means is that if you wanted 12 drives of pm7 storage you would actually have to buy 24 drives you could configure it as rate six or rate five or whatever in this individual chassis and then the entire chassis is mirrored somewhere else and when you do that all you really need is a high-speed Network interconnect between those devices well the world is hard drive is not going to work here you can use mechanical hard drives but they also have to be SAS drives they cannot be SATA no SATA devices in this chassis at all and of course sonology supports using Flash and spinning rust in the same chassis if it were me I would probably put all Flash in this chassis or pick up one of the sonology chassis that does Flash natively and then use the spinning rust through an external sass shelf but for this configuration basically it's okay if you wanted to add a more traditional Nas One like this this is the EXs 18 plus that we reviewed previously this one also supports a 25 gig Nick and will run well with a 25 gig Nick but it doesn't run as well as their Zeon de platform and this is because this is much lower cost platform and a lot of details like that this type of a Nas platform also generally will work fine with SATA hard drives whereas this requires SAS because you need the Dual porting if you want to to do high availability with a regular Nas like this as opposed to the 3400d you're going to need two of these two of these with the full drives and identical configuration in both of them ideally and then yeah you could still do high availability but isn't the 3400d just a better package isn't that obvious now in terms of I scuzzy performance with VMware I was shocked at how fast this platform is uh against an older Dell 3020 this thing runs circles around a Dell 3020 and a 3020 should have more Hardware acceleration than a Zeon D and yet here we are this is uh the superior platform in terms of Base performance I can't get super detailed with the the VMR benchmarks because VMR has a thing in their Ula where you let them review the benchmarks and the guy that I had to review the bench marks and approve them for a video isn't with VMR anymore probably because of the broadcom acquisition but I could speak in generalities and generally the VMR performance on this is very good sonology works diligently for their VMR certification and it shows hyperv also very very good performance this is uh basically a no-brainer when we're talking about 25 gbit ethernet I was kind of joking in the beginning when I said 25 gig is table Stakes but look if you do anything that you need a high performance Network for like video editing or something like that the test system I was using it's a 32 core thread Ripper I basically plugged a melanox connect X4 which is old news at this point a connect X4 is an ancient 25 gig card there are probably better choices on the market ancient connectx 4 plugged into a Dell switch which is running an open source operating system which I've previously done videos on uh those are a little more expensive now than they were when I did the video partly because of it's a whole story about Dell trying to take control of their switches by having a proprietary subscription based operating system and then that backfiring catastrophic on them and then and then they were like well okay I guess everybody can have an operating system for their switches 25 gig ethernet kind of expensive when you're buying a switch okay that's that's granted you know this platform starting at $10,000 then you have to buy storage on top of that but if you have priced out a storage device to do live video editing with reasonable latency that can run at over 2 gigabytes per second with Windows as regular file share not even I scuzzy uh this is a good deal which is kind of impressive now if you do choose to add more memory it'll always use the more memory for cash it's like a read cache so that's nice but it does also open up the other possibilities for virtualization and everything else which we'll talk more about in a second the last thing that I like about this Hardware configuration is that it does recover from unusual uh happenings pretty regularly popping a power supply out popping a drive out popping an entire controller out it fails over pretty well the way that it shows up on your network is each one of these controllers has a dedicated specific IP address but then there's a third IP address that is shared between the two of them and so either one of these nodes can take over for that IP address but if you need to for monitoring or logging or error reporting or whatever kind of telemetry system you have you can always be guaranteed that you're connecting to controller a or controller B by specific IP address but then the shared IP address can be whichever controller is able to service the request that's how they deal with it on the network side side and that's true of all of the interfaces so like if you did run a forbidden router style VM those are fun interesting videos you should check those out then you can make the one gig ports dedicated for the Lan and Wan side of your you know forbidden router or you can use your 25 gig interfaces for the Lan side and one or both of your one gig interfaces for say the WAN side the internet side and the DMZ but you're going to have to connect both of them to a switch and then your modem to a switch as well this isn't a problem if you have an Enterprise grade connection but if you have you know like a cable modem or something like that in your small business it can be a little tricky to set it up that way you may have some hoops that you have to jump through in terms of uh Mac address setting and things like that a little outside the scope of this video but it is entirely possible to run PF sensor open sense in a VM on this hardware and have Hardware failover which is pretty awesome it works a little differently than high availability Works in side PF sense and open sense there's some pros and cons with that approach but again for the scope of this video If you really wonder about that or something you're seriously considering building on you know come to the Forum show show us pictures tell us what your use case is because this is what the level one Community is all about and who knows maybe it'll end up being the basis of a future video I don't know I was also pleasantly surprised by how competent the Dual 25 gig platform is from sonology for their own nases it really wouldn't be a terrible idea to run sonology 25 gig network cards in the client as well there are windows drivers it's a it's a pretty well supported chipset the fast action chipset and uh in this world of broadcom uncertainty some an alarming number of threads on the level one forums about Intel's 25 gig networking options well these seem to hold up pretty good in Native Linux in Synology and on our threader for workstation so neat Now setting up a window share is pretty easy there's file manager but there's also configuration options like you can set smv multi Channel which will allow you to have multiple connections from your client workstations to the server transparently in order to handle faster transfers there's really no downside from turning it on it's off by default because uh it's not really I don't want to call it a new feature but it's not as well tested as off so butb M channel is something we've covered in the past and if you're curious about what exactly that is some of our really ancient videos at this point go uh pretty in depth into SMB multi Channel but it's just a windows file share thing but beyond Windows file sharing there's also ice scuzzy and this is one of the easiest ice scuzzi setups that you can have on a Windows system now if you just next next next through the wizard it actually doesn't set up authentication when you configure ice cuzy by default but you can set that uh and so the first machine that comes along will grab a hold of the disc but even on air Windows 11 client here it still has ice cui built in Windows really weirds me out with the control panel stuff where they're like oh let's change the way the control panel Works to make everything Fisher Price and I don't see them making a Fisher Price version of the Icey interface which really worries me in terms of future Icey support for client operating systems but as of right now today in the you know first half of 2024 version of Windows 11 it's there and if we run Crystal disc mark on it we see that we actually have pretty reason able performance this performs like a first generation PCI Express 3 in vme albeit with a little bit worse latency so like SATA like latencies with nvme levels of throughput this isn't bad and this icei interface is also similar to what you would experience with VMware which I've also been testing and hyperv yep testing that one too I've had this thing for a while if you're into NFS the software supports NFS you can configure that even AFP the Apple file protocol even Apple doesn't want to support you there they really don't you can also run a native FTP server or an rsync service definitely do not recommend that for the internet but in a land context okay maybe it sort of kind of makes sense even though this is a high availability platform in and of itself it also supports Synology High availability meaning that you can do another layer of replication this box could replicate to an inexpensive box filled with mechanical hard drives I mean our SSD configuration here is super over-the-top nice but if you just need an extra replica backup heck you could do that with three or four 20 terab hard drives just to have another replica on another sonology Nas boox doesn't have to be rackmount it could be a much more inexpensive platform just to have another replica you get that but Sony's whole software ecosystem has a lot of stuff in it other than active backup for business and the client software that will help you back up your client workstations like Linux Mac OS and windows and you can see that here in the package Center I mean you could deploy maffy antivirus directly on your on your Nas don't do that and a document viewer you can run DHCP you can run DNS you can run py hole you run Docker and virtual machine manager and Apache there's tons of contributed packages for this that are just a pointand click install away now on the base configuration that has 8 gabt of memory really would not recommend that you go completely crazy because the more memory that you use for those background Services the less you're going to have available for file services but the good news is adding 32 or 64 gab of memory per node it's pretty straightforward if you do like to get more memory I would recommend that you take one of the dims out of one of the controllers and put it with the other controller so there's a matched pair there and then you can get another 16 gigabytes of unregistered ECC memory put that in the other node and you get two nodes with 16 gigs and that is more than enough to run py hole or a forbidden router we'll talk more about that the other really popular software application for this is surveillance station think about what high availability gives you if you want uh a surveillance station that is always up whenever this thing has to be updated for software updates or new features in your surveillance software no problem you just hit a button to install the update and all of the surveillance stuff moves over from the primary node to the backup node seamlessly and transparently so as this thing is going through updates or anything like that you're rotating which half of the machine you're actually running on which connection to the discs you're actually running on and in so doing you're never down so it's like oh it takes 10 minutes to install an update or 30 minutes to install an update the cameras are recording continuously because you are updating the two different nodes at two different times you know an hour or two apart or whatever that looks like so high availability really gives you some interesting options sonology also begun to offer a lot of cloud-based services like C2 backup and they'll also offer remote access to your Synology through their security infrastructure if you prefer to use your own infrastructure there's a lot of uh VPN self-hosting stuff that you can do there's a VPN server that you can install on sonology you can also use it with third party services like tail scale tail scale is one of the few thirdparty services that I actually would recommend and the tail scale client for Synology is basically top shelf it's got a couple of quirks when you're using the Synology as a uh an exit node end point like you whenever this anology reboots or there's a software update you have to rerun a script from the SSH connection but other than that it's basically a first class experience if you just need it on your tailet and you need to be able to access it remotely through tail scale that works out of the box consistently reliably it's only the exit node stuff where it gets a little squirely and there's also virtual machine manager yeah this is Zeon D you can run virtual machines right here now keep in mind you don't have a ton of cores and out of the box you don't have a ton of memory to run virtual machines you can always add more memory but for running virtual machines you can run some small virtual machines like py hole or the Forbidden router so remember in my configuration dual 25 gbit ethernet that means that we're not using our onboard one and 10 Network ports can you run open sense or pfSense as a virtualized router and configure those hardwired ports on your sonology to not offer sonology services but to be passed through to the virtual machine so that you can use that as a router that has high availability yes you absolutely can this is not really an officially supported way of running these particular pieces of software so don't expect you know officially licensed sanction support even if you're paying for you know the pay for version of pfSense but it does work pretty well and that's one of the things that I was testing over the last couple of months it's very easy and straightforward to set that up you can check out the guide in the level one forms maybe we can do a separate video if you have problems with it but it's very very straightforward basically you just say hey this physical interface maps to the wport this physical interface maps to the landport I'm good to go you can also do vlans but the VLAN gooey and Synology in my opinion is not as easy to use as just using physical interfaces so so this setup where I've got 25 gig ethernet I kind of do like the idea of taking the uh 10 gig in and out for my fiber optic connection from an ISP and so it's like oh dual 10 gig dual 10 gig on both ports VLAN connected to a switch basically we're fine and that's been a quick look at the sonology sa3400 d d for dual controller and that's really what you're paying for the uh MSRP list price of this thing again is about $10,000 us before add drives but the fact that you've got dual connections to each one of those SAS drives means that you don't have to buy two sets of drives to have two cabinets replicating between one another or at least if you do decide to do two cabinets replicating you can have one that's high performance and another one that's just mechanical hard drives so cost savings there for my configuration pure ssds the sonology recommended list includes sonology drives but there are also nonology drives like Cate 16 43 will work without any complaints from the sonology interface I also tested the older 1633 is they work fine but sonology software complaints that they have not been tested as well as our modern kokia SAS drives and these kokia SAS drives are great if you have older Hardware or you just want to drop in into an existing SAS infrastructure these are brand new SAS drives great performance this is a great option SAS cleverly used here means that you've got high availability without Brank Breaking the Bank in terms of like oh I have to buy two redundant sets of drives because that's kind of how we're doing things in the Enterprise this is a good option if you need the high availability and for things that have this level of high availability the price is actually pretty reasonable so I get why anology has this product I'm with L is level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one [Music] forums

Channel: Level1Techs

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Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: AW0W2DKDrT4

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024