How to Edit Photos on your Synology NAS over ISCSI LUN Targets

[Music] hello and welcome back and today i want to kickstart a three-part series of videos where i talk to you guys about the best ways to set up a nas for photo editing now these days the size of the average photo is just a joke i mean we've gone from a point where the average jpeg and png were in kilobits in size you remember when we had mobile phones you took a picture and yes the picture was that big but it didn't take up that much space and editing photos locally was very very easy because they didn't take up that much space really but over the years you've got people that do photography you know professionally that are taking photos 25 50 100 megs apart because the sheer scale and depth of information in every single picture and when you edit those files you are editing huge huge pictures so editing them locally although desirable because you need that speed of internal drive becomes less useful at all when you don't have the sufficient for space to do it and the number of us have made that move towards editing on a nas the reason being that the connection speeds available to most noise users over 1gb with link aggregation are quite large as well as the adoption of 10 gigabit ethernet for photo and video editing now i said this is part one of three videos because in each video i'm going to talk about both in terms of pros and cons and the setup of a different way to edit photos on a nas now all of the techniques in these three videos are going to work for elements are going to work for you know um photoshop they're going to work for paint.net they're going to work for all of those different programs small and large but each one of them is going to be slightly more tailored to a different skill set a different performance and a different long-term objective now today's video we're going to talk about iscsi it's a subject we touch on on this channel maybe once a year and it is a very intimidating one it is ultimately in its most simple form the ability to turn network or remote storage into something that appears local it's the idea that it kind of hood winks your system in a way into seeing remote distance storage as if it's localized on your machine and it allows you to edit the files via your proprietary third-party editing software and on your own os your pc or mac system and edit those files as if they are on your machine now iscsi will require you on a nas to create something called a lan it is a targeted area of storage which you then convert onto your machine for it to go yep that's as good as it's local we are going to work with that now there are limitations of course and there are pros and cons first and foremost in terms of pros because it appears localized once you've set it up there is effectively nothing that you can do that you can do locally that you can't do on the nas the biggest con of course is the network speed traditionally 1gbe and wireless speed you're going to get something between 50 to 100 meg per second depending on your speed now if your files exceed that size you're going to hit a bit of a problem there but that's where things like 2.5 5 and 10 gigabit ethernet now on upgradable nozzles such as this the ds1621 plus that we're going to be using in today's video it can come in and you can upgrade the solution in accordance with the files that you edit second con it can be a little complex you're going to be dealing with a few foreign um kind of concepts that you might not know outside of a tech industry and if you're a photo or video editor what you care about is just getting the job done and we will touch on it on another plus side you can get greater speeds with iscsi luns when you create an area of storage that's accessible in this way you will get better performance than the majority of other means of directly connecting with your device in this method we contact the nas and access it like you would access a connected usb drive but with the benefit of a huge amount of storage and redundancy as well as improving your workflow to allow other users to connect with the device as well and share as well now lum used to be something that only one user could deal with at a time but london has moved far i'm sorry um iscsi and luns have moved far beyond that to a point where multiple users can access the same land with the right settings and we will talk about that during the setup but let's proceed forward with part one and let me show you guys how to set up an iscsi target lun on your nas for editing photos let's make our way into the nas okay so here we are on the desktop of our synology 6 bay in this case the ds1621xs plus i'm not sure i mentioned that in the intro now what we're going to be doing as mentioned is setting up an iscsi target with a nice land full of storage for us to play with but a few disclaimers i should probably add straight away first and foremost i am using the screen recording software obs and throughout little bits of this video i will be showing you guys about the photo um upload and imagery we're going to be using some very large images here if we go into the desktop settings here we can see some of these images are 40 30 37 megabytes in size and they are pretty large and i can imagine these may cause the odd graphical issue during screen recording while we are editing them so do bear that in mind um also with this nas we are connected via 1gbe because this video is targeted at the idea of utilizing for photo editing and although this is a 10 gigabit ethernet nas i just wanted to make sure that we utilized this device in one gbe to give you an idea of editing on a one gig connection but bear in mind that this is a 10 gigabit ethernet nas and if you're looking at editing files larger than 100 megs or editing video then you should definitely look at a 10g connection but let's go into how to set up our iscsi target now by default the majority of modern nazis all have this application readily available off the bat the iscsi manager but if you don't have it highly unlikely as that is just head into the package center and just look up the words i scuzzy i s c s i so from there if we go into that iscsi uh manager here we can go ahead and start preparing it now i will highlight some of these options here so if you know a lot of this stuff i know it's going to get boring and i apologize in advance and i'm going to try and give a nice mid-level range of background information on iscsi target so i apologize if you know that already synology does have a bunch of extras for those of you that are using um nas and iscsi for your virtual machine utilization and again not just vmware there's a bunch of vsphere and hyper-v and stuff like that um so i will highlight those throughout the video uh but remember we are talking about photo editing predominantly today so first option we want to do is head into the target menu and from there we click create we can see there's a name of our target here and we can leave that by default if you like or you can change it yourself there's also the option sort for chap or chat and this is to give your individual drive and um a login credential a username and a password this is going to be especially important if you have a drive that has multiple accessing um users at one any given time and that's particularly relevant to you vmware users um for now i'm not going to enable a login credential but i will show you later on how to add that credential but if you do add the login credentials just for this iscsi that is where you add it so we're creating our target click next and we're going to create a brand new iscsi target lun remember lan is the storage or if you've already got an existing lan you can map it in reverse or you can choose to map it later on and you're just creating the area of space for now for now i'm going to create the whole iscsi lund that is the target and the storage next we've got to give our target a name i'm going to leave it by default at land1 but obviously you can call it whatever you want and when you add storage media to your nas and created already your storage pool and your volume as dictated in my other videos when you create your area of storage for the first time so the storage pool which is all of your raid drives or your hard drives in a raid so to speak and created your area of playground storage that is your volume from there this is where your iscsi target is going to live if you're using ssd caching uh they'll show there but that's not really relevant if you're not using it so make sure you select the right volume that you've created from there say how much storage capacity you want this lum to have so in this case my system has 35 000 gigabytes of storage space readily available so let's give this a terabyte of space 1 000 gigabytes and again i'm aware it's 1024 cut me some slack now next we have space allocation now from here it's the choice about what your long-term plans are for this iscsi now with thick provisioning whatever space you give it on day one that is it so at this point with thick provisioning i will get the best read write performance in a single or multi-user case environment but i can never exceed 1 000 gigabytes however if i go for thin provisioning performance will be a touch lower and i do mean a touch lower but it allows you to change the storage throughout the utility and lifespan of your ice cutting target if we scroll down here we've got a number of synology assisted options that allow you to improve iscsi integration and iscsi um interaction with one or more users with all of these particularly in vmware environments these are largely um attributable to vm environments and hypervisor kind of scenarios but i would leave them ticked anyway because they do help interaction between your client devices and the nas host space reclamation is obviously applicable to the thin provisioning we've just spoken about and if we select thick those up that option disappears the same goes with snapshots with snapshots it allows you to create versions and background snapshots of the storage and ideally the files you're putting inside which again requires space uh reclamation later on or space provisioning early doors however if read write speeds are your priority stick with thin provisioning for now so i'm going to click next and from here it'll say that the iscsi target is prepared and the land space is about to be partitioned and saved now it's worth highlighting that you can't access the iscsi lun via traditional means on your synology file station device you can't access it like you would any other folder or the way you would with a drive or a shared folder that you've mapped i'm going to show you in parts two and three of this video series so in order to interact with our iscsi target we're going to need to use an iscsi initiator luckily windows 10 arrives with it but before we go there let's look at some of the options of the iscsi manager inside we can change a number of those options that we've already created at the beginning we can say whether we want multiple users to be able to access the iscsi target and at the same time map the drive in different ways we can even bind this particular iscsi target to an individual port on the nas in case we're running a multiple lan nas environment and we want to make sure that one dedicated full speed connection such as the one we're connected to is dedicated to the iscsi lund uh iscsi target lan that we're utilizing and there's lots of other options built in as well i recommend you check them out particularly again if you're a vm or hypervisor user so you windows users need to head down here to the option at the bottom and then in that start menu just type the word iscsi and one of the first options that will appear is the iscsi initiator now from here we need to set up connection to our iscsi target we need this ip if we're connecting over the network so for now we need to map that ip that we can see there at the top of the screen you can copy paste it if you wish or you can directly type it one by one straight into there remove any http or characters we just need the numbers and then from there click quick connect as you can see our iscsi target has been found and from here we can click done and our drive is now visible to our client pc now if you were to attach a username and a password using chap or chap from there go down to properties actually my bad go into discovery find the targets and then from here in volumes and devices go down and it allows you to alter and change a number of the configuration options in configuration we can see that the initiator for chap is here and from here we can enter the information we can even change the name of this drive that we're seeing on our client device if we so choose and there's lots of other options again a lot of uvm and hypervisor users will probably take advantage of from here click ok now we've established a connection uh took between our client pc and the iscsi target lon on the synology nas now we just need to add the drive like we would any drive on our own pc head into the my pc or my computer option and at the top find the option marked manage from here it will open up the management panel and from here go into storage and then into disk management alternatively you can just type disk management into the bottom and it will find disk management for you to go into right here in disk management it will immediately identify the drive that you have added as you can see here if we go into my my computer option we can see that right now there's my local c drive and i've got an additional ssd that i use in the background for some of my editing here we can see there are three drives we've got drive we've got that drive zero drive one and here is our brand new 1000 gigabyte drive it's now asking us to attach this logical disk so from here make sure you select gpt or guid partition table never mbr this is where your os will live and if you choose that option at the top there's a good chance you'll destabilize your os as your system will try to find an operating system on that drive so make sure you select gdp gpt it's now making this drive ready to be mounted and just like you would with any connected drive externally right click and go into new simple volume bear in mind if you have multiple iscsi's it does open the door to configuring drives together as right now this pc is seeing this drive as if you've connected a brand new physical hard drive via a cable to your pc but i don't recommend utilizing raid options on iscsi the only one i would perhaps consider is a raid 1 configuration for mirroring and even then it will not run or be particularly stable so for now select new simple volume from here click next and from here it will ask you about simplifying the volume just leave that by default it will always use the maximum storage next you need to assign a letter for your storage so in this case we're going to give it the letter s and then we can click next from here we can name this folder so we're going to call this one i scuzzy target and as you can see it's all set the same we can even change the file system there if we choose as well as creating uh compression techniques like any localized drive and perform a quick format if we choose for now we click next and click finish it's now formatting our iscsi mounted drive and as we can see it's opened up the drive and there we are my local c drive my local d drive and now our iscsi target we've now got our iscsi target here with the appearance of a localized drive it's not a network drive the system has been hooked into thinking the nas is now a locally connected drive like any other now depending on what software you use all you're going to need to do is now move your assets into this brand new folder this brand new folder of course is going to be dictated in terms of performance speed on your own network connection in my case i am using a one gigabit ethernet connection and if i go down to aja and perform some disk benchmarks i'm going to be able to see right now with a one gig test file and we'll set that at a standard 1080p we're not going to go too crazy on this because these are video editing uh test software as you can see we'll go down to our newly isguardy target enabled drive click start and we're maxing out at that 110 megabytes per second that you would dictate from a one gigabit per second sorry one gigabit network ethernet connection now bear in mind that the advantages and disadvantages of iscsi are going to be very important to your own photo editing setup for example what some of the biggest advantages of iscsi are as you can see do you get largely the maximum ethernet speed available it removes all complexity and it largely removes any sense of third-party software ownership with what you're doing any nas brand will allow you to do this with their own software without having to rely on third-party tools another advantage it has a very pure appearance of a localized drive and that means unlike some methods such as mapping a network drive or utilizing synology's own synology drive software all software will work with an iscsi land target because this drive has been told by the system that it is a logical drive and it has about it has as much right to be there as your own c drive with your os on it the fact that you don't need to do or utilize any third-party client software is also enormously useful to a number of you that only buy a nas for robust remote storage and aren't buying it for the software and of course it is massively scalable with using a thin provisioning allowing you to expand your storage ad hoc lots of snapshot options and lots of add-ons that can be utilized for not only a multi-user access environment but of course if you're a vm or hypervisor user lots of configuration options for your bespoke setup and your own bespoke storage needs but it's not all good there are of course disadvantages for example as you've seen here today it is a little complex it could be a bit more straightforward and i know this is a long video but we should touch on this everything we've done today is a much more expressed version and to really make the most of iscsi you will have to play with a number of those options also the multi-user access is considerably more intimidating than creating this single user access setup and iscsi's when you have multiple users connecting to it will need to share the bandwidth at times so the provision control for multi-users is often wildly erratic with either user whoever gets there first will generally command the largest degree of that bandwidth and lastly iscsi is just a little bit old hat it's a weak criticism but iscsi is a very very old arguably reliable means to make network and remote access storage to appear local but it is by no means something the home user is quite ready for and that's why options such as mapping network drives and of course synology's own drive and sync applications and clients have been so so popular but this has been how to set up an iscsi mapped network mapped lan to your localized pc for photo editing when it comes to interacting with your iscsi target of course it's pretty straightforward it's the same as dealing with any other file or folder if we go into the iscsi target there it's a completely blank area for us to play with if we head over to my download folder i've already created a bunch well i say created we've downloaded a bunch of free and available online photos they're quite large in their caliber so if we go in and look at the large icons we can see a lot of photos here all of which are quite large in their scale so for example we have a black and white photo here that's a 100 megapixel camera photo right now and this is on my local ssd we can log in there we can zoom in of course there's going to be a slight delay for you guys and there's going to be a little bit of fragmentation there because of the screen recording software that we're utilizing here but again we can zoom in quite far and look at that picture we can zoom in quite far to them and that's what we get from our 100 megapixel picture so if we come out of it there take all of these pictures we're going to go ahead select all i'm going to copy head back to my pc go into the iscsi target click paste and now we're sending all of that data straight away over to the now iscsi target drive and again we can log in look at the same photo again double click and there's our photo and we'll zoom in zoom into this couple again nice and straight forward and again all of this is exactly the same but this time we're accessing large-scale photos on the nas and just bear in mind about the sheer scale and the number of photos available and the amount of space that these can often take up so we've got lots of options if we go for that nice straightforward paint.net that we talked about earlier on because it's the most easy straightforward tool out there we can see that with this tool we can still edit this file quite remarkably quickly as we would if we were editing on a local ssd so again we can go for create some layers perhaps over it there open a little layer and again all we're going to do is just muck around then we're going to zoom out again and again this is exactly what we would hope for if we were editing locally i do apologize once again for any lag that you may have seen from the screen recording software remember the amount of speed you get will be dictated by your bandwidth so if you are looking for one of the best 10 gbe synology nas is out there to get 10 times to use your network speed and allow up to a thousand megabytes per second with the right media i do strongly recommend the ds 1621 xs plus you can get hold of it and learn more about the device in my reviews in the description as well as visit the guys at span.com with nearly 30 years in the business of data storage nasdas thunderbolt and more they are the experts and they can guide you to the right solution for your photo editing needs thank you so much for watching do stay tuned for part two where we will be looking at mapped network drives another means with which you can interact with your nas which is going to be considerably more easier than using iscsi but has its own drawbacks thank you so much for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: SPANdotCOM

Views: 2,708

Keywords: iscsi, iscsi target, iscsi initiator, nas, san, iscsi windows 10, iscsi tutorial, iscsi setup, storage area network, network attached storage, what is iscsi, iscsi windows, iscsi nas

Id: NJNiUQ5DXy4

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020