I'm reminded of the Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" for which ZFS was originally developed. 48 SATA drives packed in a slide-out rack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w
Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
31–40 of 376 posts
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp. source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
only threats, no court cases or journalist writing about ZFS indemnification? IOW please provide links to credible sources.
sorry, don't have a link to the CEO telling us that we were signing a partnership with oracle that included the indemnification.
I was just a lowly support engineer so not privy to all the legal details that the executives were dealing with. I too had to just take them at their word.
ETA: I searched a bit. Here's a link
https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/networking/netapp-thr...
Maybe threats were enough? I certainly wouldn't want to test it myself.
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp. source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
Oracle and NetApp 'mutually dismissed' in 2010: * https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2010/09/09/oracle-and-n... * https://www.computerworld.com/article/1585889/opinion-patent... NetApp originally sued then-independent Sun in 2007, and Sun counter-sued. Free/TrueNAS/iXsystems has been offering ZFS-based solutions for many years now, and I haven't heard NetApp going after them: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNAS…
I remember all this too. The time period that I was in this scene was AFTER 2010 though so who knows. As mentioned in response to the sibling "credible sources" bro, I was just a lowly support engineer so i had to trust that the CEO wasn't lying to us about all this.
Maybe he was ... they do that sometimes.
I looked around a little. the C&D from Netapp was in ~July 2010 and the partnership and product with Oracle in the Fall (Around the cease fire) and we continued with that (via the Oracle Partnership) through 2011-2015 when the company ran out of cash and laid us all off.
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#34[deleted]
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#35Is 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 workgro…
Could be Linux as well since ZFS on Linux is pretty good now. It would fit in with their other devices which are also Linux based AFAIK.
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#36Ubiquiti'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.
I just wish they would put better processors in their stuff. Is this yet another NAS powered by an ARM Cortex?
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#37Store page: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products... $3999
That seems reasonable, I don't buy NAS for datacenters (just run a modest 80tb one for my home lab) but equivalent rackmount 16-bay ones from other vendors would be more expensive (maybe $5k-6k?) and with less polish.
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#38I'm glad to see UBNT in this space.
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.
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wireless Time Machine backup works until one day, Time Machine decides to shit the bed. Do not trust it. Invest in a different backup solution if your data is at all important to you. Something like Arq or Backblaze or tarsnap.
I use the 3-2-1 strategy for backups. I keep one copy off-site by using cloud backups, currently I primarily use Backblaze for that purpose but am considering alternatives for several reasons. I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine, and I keep one copy on-device. I'd like to use network Time Machine to get rid of the inconvenience of having a bunch of USB external SSDs floating around, especially si…
I think a combination of:
1/ ZFS datasets with hourly (or daily) snapshots
2/ Samba with vfs_fruit
Gives the peace of mind that even when the sparsebundle shits the bed, you can rollback to a suitable snapshot and only lose a small period of backups, rather than having to lose the entire history and start again from scratch.
(I say when, not if, through considerable experience over the last 15 years that it will always, inevitably, shit the bed.)
Re: Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
#40> with ... no firmware restrictions on drive models, organizations can scale capacity without being restricted by proprietary hardware ecosystems. This looks like a dig at Synology, who do this.
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