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QNAP TS-x53Pro - follow up to the Primary Site Review

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Part of the Furniture
Picked up a QNAP TS-453Pro 8GB RAM the other day - exploring the options - primary decision was based on the feature set and the strong review on SNB...

Will post as I sort this one out - I'm primarily a contributor over on the Wireless side of the house...

sfx
 
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First set of quick notes...

1) this was shipped with drives - went this router rather than BYOD as I'm looking for a single point of support, rather than having to deal with two vendors (QNAP and drive vendor)

2) Out of Box - NAS was already initialized, so the QNAP setup walk-thru didn't work, QFinder found the NAS, and was able to manually set up most things

3) Was pre-initialized with the "home" setup, not the business setup - just means that the pre-loaded applets are a bit different as compared to each other - the "app store" can fill the gaps either way.

4) Going back to Note 2 above, the drives were already configured as a RAID5 set out of the box - tinkered around a bit with it over the weekend, and did a full reset this morning... into the Business/RAID10 - it's been about 6 hours, and the RAID10 set is still synchronizing..

5) Looking forward to seeing how Virtualization Station works out - Debian 8 (Jessie) was released early this morning :)

More tomorrow!

sfx
 
FWIW - this is not my first rodeo with a NAS type of box - they used to call them microservers back in the day...

1) Cobalt Qube 2 - MIPS based, and remarkably well ahead of it's day... that must have been around late 2000...

2) Linksys NSLU2 - the Slug... Articles of hacking the SLUG pre-SNB days got me interested - was a fun project, and I still have mine.. there's still folks hacking on this little box - total win for Linksys here...

3) Anthology Solutions Yellow Machine - big mistake here.. slow, slow, slow - big space at the time, remember this was 2005, and all sorts of RAID capabilities - hamstrung by a very slow ARM core - at the end of things, ripped out the drives, and built my own DIY box as a Samba and local WWW server...

4) DIY box 1 - Pentium 4 in a big Antec case with a dedicated Promise PATA raid controller running Win2K - note the drives above, they went into this beast - was very fast... and ran hot, and I think the power meter ran even faster - was nice in the winter :)

5) DIY box 2 - moved toward Atom with a intel Atom 330 Mini-ITX board - moved from RAID to single drives on PATA/SATA ports with shares on CentOS... carried me for a couple of years until...

6) Mac Mini Server - a 2010 Mac Mini server running SnowLeopard Server - great deal at the time in late 2010 - it's my current server now for Web with a couple of external drives for files - but it's getting old, which drove my decision to look into, and purchase, the QNAP TS-453Pro...
 
I wonder how the modest HP mini desktop
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R7R1GWK/?tag=snbforums-20

would do as a server?
The cheaper one has a cheesy 32GB SSD and 2GB RAM. The better $$ one has 500GB hard disk and more ram. DDR3 ram sticks you can change.
Comes with win 8.1, such as it is. Run Win 10 or Linux?

CPU is single core 1.4GHz Celeron. Whimpy.

But these are small and cheap and hopefully not China no-QA stuff.
 
I wonder how the modest HP mini desktop
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R7R1GWK/?tag=snbforums-20

would do as a server?
The cheaper one has a cheesy 32GB SSD and 2GB RAM. The better $$ one has 500GB hard disk and more ram. DDR3 ram sticks you can change.
Comes with win 8.1, such as it is. Run Win 10 or Linux?

CPU is single core 1.4GHz Celeron. Whimpy.

But these are small and cheap and hopefully not China no-QA stuff.

I've looked at the HP Stream Mini - while it's a lower end Celeron at 1.4GHz, it's a haswell core, and it's faster than one would think - the solid state drive is not an SSD, it's eMMC, so the read-write performance is pretty low - but as a HTPC or light duty desktop, might be good enough - I was thinking it would be almost perfect as a Point of Sale or signage box...

HP has the same unit on their storefront for $179USD, which is about 50 bucks less than what Amazon is offering it.

So let's get back on the thread topic of the QNAP TS453Pro, sound good?

sfx
 
Well... now getting settled in - RAID10 up and running in the Biz config

Playing around with the VirtSta feature - it's basically KVM/QEMU, nothing too terribly exciting or exotic these days.

Just to level some expectations however - this is an ATOM chipset - Silvermont is a good step forward from Bonnell, but if you're used to Core i7's, this is a bit of a step back...

It's going to take some CPU away from other services, just saying...

The WebClient is VNC oriented, so Firefox it does HTML5, and it's a bit slow, but it works... but some graphics issues - see below:

ts453_virtsta_vnc_screenshot.png

And to get a feel for MEM/CPU, see next post...
 
CPU utilization in VirtSta...

ts453-cpu_usage_ubuntu1404.png


and...

ts453-topstats-ubuntu1404.png


So will let it settle and see where it goes...

sfx
 
ok - kind of live blogging this... but install a couple of package for ubuntu 14.04LTS, and life is a bit better...

sudo apt-get install openssh-server gnome-session-flashback

It'll install a few packages, and then on the WebVNC Login, select Metacity vs. Compiz on Gnome-Flashback, and the GUI is much better...

Don't expose things to the internet just yet...
 
Nice - Ubuntu 14.04LTS recognized that it's running on KVM/QEMU and install the virtio drivers directly...

dmesg | grep "virtio"
[ 1.050800] virtio-pci 0000:00:06.0: irq 40 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 1.050869] virtio-pci 0000:00:06.0: irq 41 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 1.059764] virtio-pci 0000:00:03.0: irq 42 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 1.059842] virtio-pci 0000:00:03.0: irq 43 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 1.059899] virtio-pci 0000:00:03.0: irq 44 for MSI/MSI-X
 
More...

lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 2
On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 55
Stepping: 8
CPU MHz: 1999.999
BogoMIPS: 3999.99
Hypervisor vendor: KVM
Virtualization type: full
L1d cache: 24K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 1024K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0,1
 
Well... now getting settled in - RAID10 up and running in the Biz config

Playing around with the VirtSta feature - it's basically KVM/QEMU, nothing too terribly exciting or exotic these days.

Just to level some expectations however - this is an ATOM chipset - Silvermont is a good step forward from Bonnell, but if you're used to Core i7's, this is a bit of a step back...

It's going to take some CPU away from other services, just saying...

The WebClient is VNC oriented, so Firefox it does HTML5, and it's a bit slow, but it works... but some graphics issues - see below:

View attachment 3723
And to get a feel for MEM/CPU, see next post...

weird screen effects - that's probably an VNC/Mir/Wayland thing, more than it is QNAP...

sfx
 
last post for this evening... again, on the virtual machine...

@blue-test:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0627:0001 Adomax Technology Co., Ltd
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

@blue-test:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma] (rev 02)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II]
00:01.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371SB PIIX3 IDE [Natoma/Triton II]
00:01.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Cirrus Logic GD 5446
00:03.0 Ethernet controller: Red Hat, Inc Virtio network device
00:04.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:04.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:04.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:04.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:05.0 Unclassified device [00ff]: Red Hat, Inc Virtio memory balloon
00:06.0 SCSI storage controller: Red Hat, Inc Virtio block device
 
What drives are you using? How's the sound level (power supply fan vs. case fan vs drives)?
 
Seagate NAS Enterprise 3TB * 4 - ST3000VN0001

Noise level - about the same as a desktop PC - it's there, but it's mostly white noise, do hear the disk activity obviously on reads/writes.

In 90F ambient air temp, it runs about 105F with the fan on auto, which is a bit of a concern...
 
105F is not a concern for HDD's in general.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/

However, for the Seagate models, you may have a valid concern.

I can back up their observations - we had a thermal event about 18 months ago, where we lost both chillers, and ambient went from 50F to 95F - and this is an older data center, where we have cold/hot rows, but not forced in-rack (no raised floor, no plenum). Drive chassis got up to about 120F from a normal 90F or so... pretty toasty..

In the last 6 months, I've replaced over 20 seagate 1TB enterprise SAS drives - HGST and WD, no problems... and many of the seagates failed suddenly, no SMART warning - just boom and gone... and most of those drives that died were less than 4 years old... I've been working with Seagate and NetAPP/IBM to sort out a plan on rolling over the suspect drive SN ranges before we have more failures.

My ORD/IAD data center clusters - same configurations - we don't see the turnover of dead drives that we see in DEN, we still get a couple every now and then, but nothing like what we see in DEN

sfx

(and this story is why I have Seagate NAS enterprise SATA drives, got a heck of a deal on them)
 
Quick benchmark example with Virtualization Station - QTS 4.1.3 as Host, Ubuntu 14.04LTS as guest..

Benchmark Suite - phoronix-test-suite_5.6.0_all.deb

phoronix-test-suite benchmark build-linux-kernel

Single Core:

Timed Linux Kernel Compilation 3.18-rc6:
pts/build-linux-kernel-1.5.3
Test 1 of 1
Estimated Trial Run Count: 3
Estimated Time To Completion: 23 Minutes
Running Pre-Test Script @ 07:38:04
Started Run 1 @ 07:38:36
Running Interim Test Script @ 08:18:39
Started Run 2 @ 08:18:49
Running Interim Test Script @ 08:58:47
Started Run 3 @ 08:58:56 [Std. Dev: 0.05%]
Running Post-Test Script @ 09:38:55

Test Results:
2400.3632471561
2397.8650779724
2398.5512552261​

Average: 2398.93 Seconds

Two Core's allocated:

Timed Linux Kernel Compilation 3.18-rc6:
pts/build-linux-kernel-1.5.3
Test 1 of 1
Estimated Trial Run Count: 3
Estimated Time To Completion: 2 Hours, 1 Minute
Running Pre-Test Script @ 09:51:18
Started Run 1 @ 09:51:48
Running Interim Test Script @ 10:11:23
Started Run 2 @ 10:11:32
Running Interim Test Script @ 10:30:36
Started Run 3 @ 10:30:46 [Std. Dev: 1.41%]
Running Post-Test Script @ 10:49:49

Test Results:
1171.8719360828
1144.2051720619
1143.2095899582

Average: 1153.10 Seconds
virtsta_1core_cpu1.png
virtsta_2core_cpu.png
virtsta_1core_cpu1.png virtsta_2core_cpu.png
 
As a point of comparision - bare metal on a celeron 1037U...

I won't do bare-metel on the QNAP, as the linux environment there - any tweaks could blow the whole thing up - I'll talk to that in a later post...

Comparing benchmarks though makes sense when looking at the 1037U (IvyBridge) vs the J1900 (Baytrail-D) - J1900 needs all four Silvermont small cores to hit the same level of performance as the 2 big cores in the IvyBridge... and they're pretty much comparable in Multiple Thread use cases, but the 1037U is twice as fast in a single thread.

Hardware:
Processor: Intel Celeron 1037U @ 1.80GHz (2 Cores), Motherboard: MSI MS-B0621 v100, Chipset: Intel 3rd Gen Core DRAM, Memory: 4096MB, Disk: 500GB HGST HTS545050A7, Graphics: Intel HD 2500, Audio: Realtek ALC887-VD, Monitor: LM-1702, Network: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 + Realtek RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n

Software:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04, Kernel: 3.13.0-51-generic (x86_64), Display Driver: intel 2.99.910, Compiler: GCC 4.8.2, File-System: ext4, Screen Resolution: 1280x1024

Timed Linux Kernel Compilation 3.18-rc6:
pts/build-linux-kernel-1.5.3
Test 1 of 1
Estimated Trial Run Count: 3
Estimated Time To Completion: 23 Minutes
Running Pre-Test Script @ 13:54:29
Started Run 1 @ 13:54:49
Running Interim Test Script @ 14:04:39
Started Run 2 @ 14:04:47
Running Interim Test Script @ 14:14:37
Started Run 3 @ 14:14:45 [Std. Dev: 0.98%]
Running Post-Test Script @ 14:24:24

Test Results:
586.63589811325
590.56137919426
579.20685911179

Average: 585.47 Seconds
 

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