The Synology DS1511+, or, Another Reason To Love Synology
February 27th, 2012
Everyone already knows I love Synology. And those who have joined the growing list of Synology owners have quickly found out exactly why I love Synology so much. It’s not because I’ve joined a religion, or because they gave me free hardware (which they did in this case; full disclosure after all!) It’s because Synology really is the best tool not just for the job, but for many, many jobs.
The Setup in Phil’s Network
For those of you unfamiliar with my setup at home, it’s a mix of “very typical for a home user” and “holy crap that’s complicated.” I have two Synology systems; a DS410 and a new DS1511+. These provide storage over CIFS/SMB2, NFS, and iSCSI to Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Pro, VMware ESXi, FreeBSD 8, FreeBSD 9, and Linux. That’s the complicated part. I also do not have LACP available, so my DS1511+ is only using both interfaces independently and doing multipathing.
The simple part is having various file sets available on shared folders; primarily my substantial music library, and the large number of documents and files for the startup. There’s nothing all that fancy going on there. Or at least there wasn’t. Then Synology was kind enough to send me a DS1511+ equipped with 5 1TB Seagate disks. So I went “hey. These things are real close to an Enterprise feature set. And they have this new CloudStation stuff in DSM 4.0! Why am I not using this to my advantage?”
So, let’s talk about doing exactly that. And why I love Synology even more than before.
Seriously Good Hardware
When you unbox the DS1511+ you’re going to notice something immediately – this box is heavy. Not just reassuringly heavy, either. You feel like you’re handling a mini tank, thanks to a solid steel disk frame, a heavy gauge steel cover, and a very sturdy plastic fascia. Unlike some other NAS options, the DS1511+ doesn’t feel cheap or even mid-range. It looks and feels downright expensive. You feel like you’re unboxing a new high end workstation instead of a surprisingly affordable NAS. (You can get the DS1511+ for just $770 from Amazon.
The disk trays are hot-swappable and use a double-lock mechanism to prevent accidental removal. There’s a latching tab plus a push-lock, all made of heavy duty plastic. The trays themselves are thick plastic, but with just enough flex to make sure they don’t crack when you handle them. This is a box you will want to work on, just to marvel at the job the hardware engineers did. It’s like they took even the minor quirks with every preceding model, and fixed them aggressively. I’m not a huge fan of the DS410’s trays – I absolutely love the DS1511+’s.
CPU horsepower is leaps and bounds above my DS410; there’s a dual core CPU clocked at 1.8GHz in here. If that’s not enough to get you excited, how about upgradable memory? When you remove the cover, it’s right there on the system board, a single SO-DIMM socket that will happily take up to another 2GB of memory for a total of 3GB. But my favorite touch here is the power cable socket. It shows you just how much attention to detail Synology put into this hardware. It’s deeply recessed with a stepped receptacle for a standard power cable. You have to really shove it in there. And it stays in there, thanks to that stepped receptacle making it very difficult to accidentally wiggle or yank the cable back out. That’s right – the power cable retention is built right into the socket itself, with no annoying clip.
There’s another detail of the DS1511+ you’re almost definitely going to overlook; the two indentations on the top of the cover. That’s function, not form. You see, those indentations are spaced exactly to hold the feet of a Synology DX510 expansion unit
By the way, the DS1511+ likes the number two. Two eSATA expansion ports. Two pairs of USB ports. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Two 80mm low noise fans. But it only has one DB15 port – the photos show it exposed, but it will ship covered. You can possibly get it off, but personally I recommend just leaving it be. I didn’t even try to figure out what it did, which is probably nothing at all.
In other words, the hardware is going to make you a very happy owner, before you’ve even plugged the system in. This is a box you are going to be proud to display in your office.
Double Thin iSCSI is In!
Rule number one of Thin Provisioning in the Enterprise space is simple – don’t double down thin provisioning. As in, don’t use thin provisioned VMDKs and Guests on a Thin Provisioned LUN. Well, with Synology, throw this out the window. Sort of.
Let’s start with why I’m using and able to use double thin provisioning to get even more capacity out of my Synology DS1511+. First, I’m using iSCSI LUNs as files on an existing RAID5 volume. Second, I don’t have a need for high write performance. Third, most of my VMs are pretty small when thin provisioned – under 10GB all said and done. This makes thin provisioned iSCSI LUNs and thin provisioned VMDKs a workable combination.
The catch here comes in with parts two and three. The write performance of thinly provisioned iSCSI LUNs is low; it can dip down to 10MB/s, while read hits and sustains over 100MB/s. On a single Gigabit interface from 7200RPM disks. If that didn’t floor you, well, I don’t know what will, since that’s pretty much the effective limit of GigE. As the underlying volume gets toward full, write performance may drop further still.
What this means for you is this – for your home lab where most of your disk operations are read? The performance hit on writes is well worth it. It really is. If you have to have thick provisioned VMDKs, well, use thin provisioned iSCSI anyway! Again; once written, read performance is easily at or just past 95MB/s per interface. Your only penalty comes in when you’re doing a lot of very long writes.
Just How Awesome is the iSCSI?
Despite being able to go on and on, I truly lack the words to describe just how fantastic a job Synology has done with the iSCSI implementation on the DS1511+, especially in DSM 4.0. Beta it says, Production it behaves. I decided to feign going in completely blind on both sides; in other words, act like I didn’t know anything about iSCSI.
Setting up the LUN on the DS1511+ wasn’t just trivial. It was almost too easy. Go to Storage Manger. Create an iSCSI target – I named it for my ESXi system, and replaced the IQN with the hostname of the client. Checked “Enable CHAP” and gave it a name and password. Then I created a new iSCSI LUN as regular files, named it, left Thin Provisioning as yes, and changed the capacity to 100GB, and clicked finish. It’s that simple on the Synology side. I now had a secured iSCSI target and associated LUN.
From the VMware side, well, it was even easier. Enable iSCSI on the appropriate LAN interface. Edit properties of the iSCSI HBA. Go to Dynamic Discovery and add the Synology as an iSCSI server by hostname, configure the CHAP settings to put in the username and password, click OK twice, click close, go back to Storage configuration and rescan. Format discovered LUN and we’re done.
If you want to truly amaze yourself, do it on Windows 7. Same procedure up to the part where we switch to VMware. On Windows 7, you have to go to Administrative Tools to find the iSCSI Initiator. Then all you have to do is click ‘Refresh’ on discovered targets, select the correct target from the Synology and click Connect. If you set CHAP, that’s under Advanced – Enable CHAP log on, enter user and password, done. You now have an iSCSI disk on Windows – the one catch being that you have to go to Disk Management to format it. Right click on Computer, go to Manage, then Disk Management under Storage. Format it, assign a drive letter, and done.
No, seriously. It really is that simple. Even if you have absolutely no experience with or idea how iSCSI works at all, you can get this up and running in less than 10 minutes. Create your new guest on the iSCSI datastore and well, that’s that. You’re running on iSCSI. The Synology doesn’t suffer from false-thin either, so when you format NTFS or VMFS, it stays nice and thin.
DSM 4.0 is Canned Awesome. Here’s why.
I could go on for days and days and days about all the other fun things you can do with your Synology. LDAP server? Yup. OpenERP running on your DS1511+? I tested it out, and not only did it work great, it left ample CPU and memory available at the same time. WordPress? There’s a package for that too! But you already have these things on DSM 3.2. So what’s different in DSM 4.0?
Let’s start with key modification number one: breaking out what used to be preinstalled unremoveable packages. The first time you run DSM 4.0 you’re going to immediately go “wait, where’s DownloadStation? Where’s Media Server? What the hell happened here? I lost stuff!” No. Synology realized that not everyone uses every package, and preinstalling all of them didn’t always make sense. Go to the upper left icon, click Package Center, then go to Available – hey, there they are! I wasn’t expecting this change at all, got caught completely by surprise, and fixed it without searching forums. It’s perfectly logical, and makes a tremendous amount of sense from a development perspective.
See, when you divorce packages like Download Station, Cloud Station, and so on from the core operating system you do two big things. First, you make it easier to debug and fix problems – fixing bug in Download Station means updating the package, instead of having to update the entire operating system. Second, you make it easier to develop everything going forward. You can add all kinds of neat things to packages and quickly implement them, without having to do an entire OS build around them. That means an update cycle that can be cut to a few weeks, instead of the months of testing required for an operating system build.
When it comes to DSM 4.0, there are changes under the hood, but I don’t want to get into them. Why? Because for DS1511+ owners, they’re not going to see too much here. Performance improvements are negligible in my experience, simply because DSM 3.2 is that awesome. Cache performance seems slightly improved, but it just doesn’t matter – it’s already going to be capable of more or less running at 90MB/s+ per interface consistent on 3.2 or 4.0. There’s no new RAID types – personally I like RAID5, but you still have all the options of RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, and RAID5 with Hot Spare and the goodies like Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) and RAID6. (Suddenly the DS1812+ with its 8 disks makes even more sense, doesn’t it? 6+P+Q is quite delicious I hear.)
I wanted to write about Cloud Station, Synology’s new cloud service that quite literally turns any Synology running DSM 4.0 into your personal cloud server, but I couldn’t get it to work. The reason being that I couldn’t get my firewall to behave quite right, so it’s entirely on me. The writing I have read on it, is that it is fantastic. Part of the magic is that the Cloud Station creates and updates a Dynamic DNS entry provided entirely for free by Synology. Yes, FREE. The whole service package is FREE as in COSTS NO MONEY as in NOT AN EXTRA COST FEATURE and you get the idea. Go to Control Panel, go to ezCloud, Enable DDNS support, select Synology as your service provider, register, done! There’s some iOS goodies available, but obviously, I’m not an iOS user.
The other free cloud-like service is Synology’s new zero cost (yes, ALSO free) monitoring. It’s quite simple. Create your username and password. Register your storage system with Synology by serial number. Go to the new MyDS Center and login. For DSM 4.0, you need to configure ezCloud with the correct login information, but once you have? Your Synology’s health is now remotely monitored with callhome capability – how cool is that? Very, very cool. Speaking of…
What happens when it breaks?
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that my Synology DS1511+ broke rather badly, rather early on. I’m not going to name names – SEAGATE – but somebody, and I’m not saying who – SEAGATE – shipped a defective disk. This disk from someone – NAMED SEAGATE – began remapping sectors silently and writing uncorrected CRC errors from day one, and then experienced mechanical failure due to a platter defect. This in turn broke my DS1511+.
Now to be 100% clear, NONE of the problem was Synology’s fault, nor was it any issue with DSM. The disk failed tests, but wasn’t doing so properly. (Yes, it was failing failure mode.) This resulted in silent and undetectable corruption all over the DS1511+, which in turn, basically caused total data loss. Not because of DSM or the Synology but because the drive wrote bad blocks to itself. That then proceeded to contaminate the rest of the array and the base operating system, because the drive was reporting these bad blocks as OK. Thanks for that, Seagate.
So first and foremost, Synology support may be slow compared to some others – they usually took about two days to get back to me – but they’re also not people reading from a script or giving you canned answers. They do their homework, they test, they reproduce whenever they can. They actually know the product they’re working with, and they take the time to make sure they get the right answer instead of the easy answer. They could have thrown up their hands and said “reset the unit to factory and reformat” at the first sign of OS level trouble, but they didn’t. We spent well over a week working on the problem before deciding the best course of action was exactly that – reinstall the base OS and format the disks. And when we did that, it wasn’t because it was the shortest path. It was because it was the only way to resolve the problem.
So all my problems came down to one very, very bad disk. The chances of you running into this problem yourself are approximately between nil and zero. (Or should be.) You’d have to have a disk installed that should have failed manufacturer QA, then run full exercise tests with that disk including full writes and have it pass, then another dozen steps before mechanical failure to maybe have a chance of reproducing.
As to Synology’s support, well, it’s a love/dislike thing – I can’t say I hate it. I only hate it when support drops the ball or ignores the problem. (Even when there’s a significant delay due to problems RMAing the faulty disk.) Synology has very knowledgeable staff in their support department, they’re dedicated, and their primary concern is getting the problem resolved – these are the things I love. They also don’t drop the ball, and they have never once replied with just a canned answer, or failed to understand my concern or question. What I dislike is the speed and system, unfortunately. There’s no good way to track the status of your open ticket, and as I said, support can be a while getting back to you. I know that Synology is working on the speed problem, and I’m hopeful that with the new MyDS center the system will improve quickly.
As for fixing a bad disk in the DS1511+? It’s near enterprise style failure handling, no joke. When your disk fails (well at least when it fails properly) the Alert LED lights amber, you get push notifications and emails, and a pretty mild buzzer goes off. Sorry guys; I’m used to the 105dBA of an LSI Elite1650. (Now THAT’S a RAID alarm.) It’ll grab your attention in anything short of a data center though. Failure thus identified, you don’t even need to go into the DSM management interface. Identify failed disk. Push up the latch lock, push in the latch to unlock it, and simply remove the failed disk. Swap the new disk into the tray, insert the new disk, and it automatically starts rebuilding the array. For a 5 x 1TB RAID5, it’s very quick – it took less than 6 hours to perform a rebuild when I tested it.
Since replacing that particularly obnoxious faulty disk? I have had exactly zero problems with my DS1511+. Operation has been flawless, without so much as a single hiccup on any protocol or for any reason. And believe me, I have tried some things that by all rights, should have at least made it grind to a halt. Nothing doing. (And of course, my DS410 continues to be the bastion of reliability, while everything else in my office breaks. Go figure!)
I heard something about multipathing?
You might have. Were you followed? No? Are you sure you weren’t?
Remember how I said I didn’t have LACP? Well, I still don’t. But the DS1511+ has two Ethernet ports, and I have two free ports on my switch, so may as well keep things even right? And while we’re at it, let’s do some interesting shenanigans just to see if they can be done. Turns out, they all can be.
Step one, two interfaces connected, two different IPs. Step two, setup internal DNS with individual A records plus an A record that covers both interfaces. (In my case it’s lan1.ds1511, lan2.ds1511 and ds1511 for the combined.) So what happens when one does this instead of LACP? Well, hosts hitting the “ds1511″ A record will hit either interface, depending what record DNS returns first. It’s a primitive sort of load balancing. But what else happens?
Well, iSCSI turns from “this is pretty cool” into “wait, I can do WHAT with the DS1511+?” Perhaps you have heard of this thing called MPIO. Yes, if you configure the DS1511+ on two separate switches with two separate interfaces, your performance is generally going to be capped at around 90MB/s. However, you now have an actual MPIO configuration. No, seriously. When you look at it in VMware, you’ve got two paths to the iSCSI LUN. I haven’t quite figured out how to get Active/Active Round Robin reads working right though – but that’s a matter of VMware tuning and loading it properly. (And probably upgrading to ESXi 5 too.)
More to the point, this also works on Windows. Unless you have multiple Ethernet interfaces on either client, you’re still going to see around a 95MB/s hard limit – especially with 6GB+ files. Unfortunately, for some reason, despite having two GigE interfaces on my desktop and two paths to the DS1511+, I couldn’t get Windows to not be frustrating about it and refuse to connect to more than one interface. However, when I forced the issue by creating two separate connections explicitly? Synology claims a maximum read of 197.8MB/s – well, they have a better switch and cables than I do. I only hit a combined read of 184.1MB/s. Trust me though – with a good switch and better cables and client interfaces (curse you, Realtek!) you will hit 197.8MB/s easily.
So what’s the conclusion other than “Phil loves it”?
Let’s talk about use cases. Synology pitches the DS1511+ as a great fit for small businesses. And it definitely is. Especially with features like backing up to Amazon S3 and HiDrive, backing up between Synology units (like say, a DS1511+ on DSM 4.0 backing up to a DS410 on DSM 3.2. It works!), incredibly easy but powerful management, and the list goes on.
Home office? Yes, without a doubt, especially with EzCloud and the backup features. Your massive media collection? The new Media Server is fantastic and the indexing works even better on DSM 4.0. Home lab? Absolutely recommended for VMware and Citrix – certified compatible, behaves nicely with clusters, and positively screams. And for every scenario, it’s the only 5 bay NAS that has any scalability.
No, really. I did some homework on the competition in 5 bay high-end NAS. To compete you had to have two GigE interfaces and support CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and have officially supported applications comaprable to the defaults in DSM 3.2 (so AD integration, DownloadStation, Media Server, and at least one other.) You can guess which shiny magic black box utterly failed to make the cut.
Out of the three remaining serious contenders, one had to be evaluated based on their 6 drive model – which offers no external expansion capability whatsoever. None. Attaching a single USB drive, does not count. One offers only one eSATA port and doesn’t support or even permit attaching anything to it – then “stacks” by requiring you to buy more base units that do software RAID over iSCSI. Er, say what? So why did you even include an eSATA port in the first place if you won’t permit anything attached to it?
The remaining competition offers two eSATA ports, just like the DS1511+. They even have a list of supported devices you can attach to these eSATA ports. They even make some of these devices. They more or less claim to be the equal of the DS1511+. Until you realize that those eSATA ports only support one drive devices, period. That’s it. You can connect a total of two, specifically supported USB+eSATA device that can only contain one single disk.
That leaves the Synology DS1511+ as a tiny god; it is, in fact, the only 5-bay NAS where the manufacturer not only intended real eSATA expansion, but also makes and supports that expansion. The maximum of the competition is a total of 2 additional drives. Not devices; drives. That’s not scaling – that’s wasting hardware.
The DS1511+ can support a total of 15 SATA drives (with 2 DX510
Forget “not to be taken lightly.” When the DS1511+ walks down the street, every other 5 and 6 bay NAS dives for cover, praying their owners don’t notice it. Maybe they can match the performance. Maybe they can match some of the features. We wouldn’t be here if Synology settled for that. When you consider the price – under $800; the performance – best of the best; the features – more than anyone else; the compatibility – every OS under the sun including VMware and Citrix; and the expansion? The DS1511+ isn’t just in a class of its own – they had to build a new school just for it.
So why are you still here? Go buy one.
And if you buy one, pretty please use my Amazon affiliate link above. Or just go direct to Synology – just tell them @RootWyrm sent you. :)
And the Disclaimer!
Synology was kind enough to send me this DS1511+ (including disks) at no charge. All they asked in return was I write about my experiences with it, positive and/or negative. If you follow me on Twitter, you know just how vocally frustrated I got with the problems stemming from that bad disk. I hit a rough spot, and I won’t lie – it was incredibly frustrating. But as ever, I evaluate based on the whole and don’t let “hey this is free” interfere with technical facts. Just gives me an opportunity to evaluate support! And since fixing that disk, the DS1511+ has continued to impress at every turn, and refused to even admit it had a problem.
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