Ubiquiti's biggest feature is no monthly recurring cost. I really hope they continue the streak on products like this. Seems like anything else bought up these days is switched to an MRR model with no vision into the long term viability.
That’s just patently not true for Ubiquiti. You enter the Enterprise space with them and you are paying monthly. Their very expensive Identity Enterprise monthly per user subscription and their per site support charges to be able to get help with their latest rushed release. Paying extra for Apple wallet support. And you don’t even get complete APIs in return, or proper SCIM integrations. Can’t even pull access logs via API. Infuriating company that just do not function at scale.
1. Your use case falls squarely into "you should be paying for support" territory.
2. You're setting things up incorrectly. You should be shipping logs, not scraping them when you think you need them.
I am highly interested in this, especially if it works well with Time Machine to do backups over the network. I've got a fully 10GbE + WiFi 7 network w/ Ubiquiti gear already, would love to ditch my janky DIY NAS setup for something that is integrated with the rest and could potentially give me a better backup setup for my photography as well as enough storage to act as a media server.
Synology also don't (didn't?) offer a ZFS product, which is why I bought a QNAP. Restriction-free and ZFS storage. Apparently you can also completely replace the OS if you want, although I haven't tried it.
Nice that it's plain OpenZFS, no paid license layer, yay! Ubiquiti sometimes ships v1 hardware and ghosts their own roadmap, but this kinda neuters the downside. If they lose interest, you just pull the disks and zpool import on any box (assuming feature flag parity). That's a saner path than Synology, with their "unauthorized" drive warnings.
Is this some xBSD or UniFi OS (debian) with ZFSoL? Can't tell from what they've written. 8C+64GB: enough for essential block+file service, but not for dedup and other demanding ZFS features. Also, doesn't appear the controller is redundant; just the power supplies. iSCSI is headlined; nice they didn't limit this to file. No mention of object store, or NVMe-oF.
Seems like a nice, basic, affordable platform for workgroup/SME stuff. Not NetApp/Pure Storage "enterprise" grade though.
Then-still-independent Sun sold storage appliances, and during their development and debugging it was noticed that vibrations effected performance… by yelling at the drives:
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
QNAP unforgivably uses a proprietary version of ZFS with their own extensions that are not compatible with mainline OpenZFS.
It can only zfs send/receive to other QNAP devices. While your data is protected like any other ZFS system, it is _NOT_ interoperable. You can not take a zpool out of a QNAP system and access it on another system with ZFS.
I discovered this painfully the hard way, and won't buy from them again, unless I plan to wipe the software and run something open.
> "Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 ports and redundant power supplies for resilience"
Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing.
Instead I just threw up my hands and replaced all the spinning disks with NVMe drives for the data I actually shared (8x 4TB NVMe drives.) And now it very usable and no need for LRArc, etc. Random or streaming access is equally fast.
Best choice I made. Now I did do this over a year ago so I skipped the NVMe price inflation.
I still keep 4 spinning disks but it is for archival data that I expect to never access unless something bad happens. It is slow and I use it like a tape drive.
It does have a dual NVMe cache; those in RAID-0 will saturate (e.g. I believe just one Samsung 990 Pro can write at just over 50Gbps).
The bigger risk is the CPU. This is an issue with the Ubiquiti UNAS Pro 8, their ~$800 USD 8 bay NAS. In theory it has 10gig networking. In practice the CPU physically cannot transfer bits fast enough, because its a dinky underpowered ARM CPU that they clearly chose to hit that quite affordable price point. Its a decent trade-off, because similar units from Synology are more like $1600, and you can meaningfully hit somewhere between 2.5gig and 10gig; but saturating 10gig is out of the question.
The ENAS has a beefier CPU so it might keep up with 25gig (could this do 50gig bonded?). But only testing will tell.
> Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I can mostly saturate my toy 100gbit link with it on read (to memory, since the other side also needs to not be the problem). Just for as long as it's already in the ZFS cache (which can be huge with in the hundreds GB of ram in servers in general). Not in practice since when you hit the disks you take a massive penalty, but then again, it can be done.
What is the current state of ZFS? I know it had some licensing issues traditionally, despite it being a delight to use every time I've tried it. Is it back?
I've been using ZFS on linux for like... 14 years now? I've migrated through centos, ubuntu, and debian during that time and the zpools never had any issues that weren't hardware related.
ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.
I even use it on single spinning rust USB drives. Zero problems.
I was literally looking today to see if there was any news on this, because it’s been widely assumed that they’d release it.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
i like their gear, I bought a whole bunch, but I couldn't and can't figure out how to give my wife access to their Protect app as well. It's absurd to the point where their MFA sent doesn't work when trying to authorize her - and judging by reddit posts etc I'm not the only one. Such mundane things are where UI falls apart, wrong details. Instead of giving elves resources to pack each individual rackmount screw, if they spent some more time on workflows and software, they'd be a truly great company.
I haven’t encountered this bug, but I have been frustrated that there’s no way to give a babysitter temporary access to the cameras in the kids’ rooms.
I ended up hosting a local site that embeds the RTSP feeds, which works pretty well, but I was surprised that there’s no native way to do it
Been a long time fan of Ubiquiti, and I think this product will do particularly well in small-medium businesses. Think of the local marketing firm with 40 employees. They likely have an office with Unifi networking, and they LIKELY hire an MSP to do their IT work. An MSP will easily try to sell this as their storage solution since they can manage the infrastructure with one login to the UBNT dashboard.
It's nice that they're doing this, but don't bet the farm on this product until they release a second version. Not saying I've been burned by them pulling a product and then memory-holing its existence, but, um.
My experience of Ubiquiti is through their Dream Router 7. What a piece of crap that is. Can't even get good WiFi in adjacent rooms where same ancient Asus router wasn't breaking a sweat. Connection drop outs are a nice bonus. Don't forget booting for ages, fan noise etc.
If other products are so bad like that one, I don't know what is the hype for this company.
First hand experience many times over: there is little more regrettable than placing Ubiquitis latest test-it-in-prod release in to an Enterprise setting.
I mean it's all prosumer grade stuff. I get hassled at work to sell their network gear over Cisco and Aruba because of the price but it's a flashy and cheap.
I built a 12-bay NAS recently. I snagged a 5900X/Supermicro server board/128GB DDR4 ECC combo for only $680 on eBay right before memory prices went apeshit. It has IPMI and 2x10g. Suffice to say I belive you can roll your own appliance like this for considerably less money, and have far more control over it. I say this as a Unifi fanboi.
61 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 72.7 ms ] thread1. Your use case falls squarely into "you should be paying for support" territory. 2. You're setting things up incorrectly. You should be shipping logs, not scraping them when you think you need them.
This looks like a dig at Synology, who do this.
$3999
Seems like a nice, basic, affordable platform for workgroup/SME stuff. Not NetApp/Pure Storage "enterprise" grade though.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing.
Instead I just threw up my hands and replaced all the spinning disks with NVMe drives for the data I actually shared (8x 4TB NVMe drives.) And now it very usable and no need for LRArc, etc. Random or streaming access is equally fast.
Best choice I made. Now I did do this over a year ago so I skipped the NVMe price inflation.
I still keep 4 spinning disks but it is for archival data that I expect to never access unless something bad happens. It is slow and I use it like a tape drive.
The bigger risk is the CPU. This is an issue with the Ubiquiti UNAS Pro 8, their ~$800 USD 8 bay NAS. In theory it has 10gig networking. In practice the CPU physically cannot transfer bits fast enough, because its a dinky underpowered ARM CPU that they clearly chose to hit that quite affordable price point. Its a decent trade-off, because similar units from Synology are more like $1600, and you can meaningfully hit somewhere between 2.5gig and 10gig; but saturating 10gig is out of the question.
The ENAS has a beefier CPU so it might keep up with 25gig (could this do 50gig bonded?). But only testing will tell.
I can mostly saturate my toy 100gbit link with it on read (to memory, since the other side also needs to not be the problem). Just for as long as it's already in the ZFS cache (which can be huge with in the hundreds GB of ram in servers in general). Not in practice since when you hit the disks you take a massive penalty, but then again, it can be done.
Would be nice to have a CSI, but I can probably just use democratic-csi like I already do on my homemade ZFS based storage appliance.
ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.
I even use it on single spinning rust USB drives. Zero problems.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
I ended up hosting a local site that embeds the RTSP feeds, which works pretty well, but I was surprised that there’s no native way to do it
If other products are so bad like that one, I don't know what is the hype for this company.
First hand experience many times over: there is little more regrettable than placing Ubiquitis latest test-it-in-prod release in to an Enterprise setting.