EonNAS 1100 NAS Server Review

Manufacturer: Infortrend Technology Inc.
Product Name: EonNAS 1100
Model Number: EN1100MC-0032
UPC: 886763000156
Price As Tested: $1089.99 (Newegg)

Full disclosure: The product used in this review was supplied by Infortrend

Data Rot! Ever hear that term? No? The truth is, most of us have experienced it in one form or another. Every time one of your old floppy drives gave up the ghost and you lost some files, you experienced it. The trouble is, we all thought the problem went away when we got rid of "soft" media like tape, and it's circular cousin, the floppy disk. All digital storage technologies: CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HDD, SSD, NAND - they're all susceptible to data rot, or bit rot, as it's sometimes called. Benchmark Reviews recently highlighted the reliability issues that SSD users are experiencing, and although the failure modes for those devices usually produce what is known as a "brick", the large number of flash memory failures in these devices has been an eye-opening experience for consumers. We can instinctively comprehend how a hard drive "crashes", but we're not so clear on how electrons disappear.

Fortunately, the people who create, deploy, and maintain large data centers have been aware of this issue for a long time, and they prompted device manufacturers to devise ways of dealing with it. Now, for the first time, those techniques are being made available to the general consumer, with some innovative new products from Infortrend. The key to maintaining a consistently high level of data integrity is found in the ZFS file system employed in the EonNAS 1000 series. ZFS features an extensive hierarchical checksum strategy, which eliminates what is often called "silent" data corruption with self-healing storage algorithms. Operating way down at the file system level, ZFS attacks data rot where it starts, at the bit, byte, and block level.

The EonNAS series has another significant feature inherited from the big iron storage solutions - Deduplication. Infortrend has implemented block-level deduplication in these new NAS models, which has the potential to reduce storage requirements by 70% with typical SOHO or SMB data. That means you can possibly store 10TB of data on 3TB of disk space, without using bit-level file compression techniques. It all depends on how much of your data is repetitive, but if you think about email for instance, you can easily imagine the tremendous amount of duplication that's present in most organizations' email traffic. The same thing happens when you want to maintain sequential backup files, let's say the last 10 days' worth. This is a common way of mitigating against data loss that isn't always immediately obvious. With multiple, full daily backups, you have the ability to unwind your data stream back to the exact day when the loss took place, rather than having to choose between yesterday's and last week's version of data. With deduplication, ten days of daily backups need only consume a little more than a single snapshot.

The EonNAS 1100 is the smallest and least expensive member of their new EonNAS 1000 series, launched this year. This four bay model is a 1U high 19" rack mount unit, the form factor that's affectionately known as a "pizza box". Inside are an Intel Atom Dual-Core CPU, an ICH9R Southbridge, and 4GB of DRAM to push the data around. That's an unusually high amount of RAM for an entry-level unit, and we'll see why it's there, later. For all of its benefits, the ZFS file system does extract a performance penalty. Two Gigabit Ethernet network ports are standard, with no expansion capability for additional Network Interface Cards (NIC). Four SATA 3Gb/s drive bays offer single disk, and RAID 0/1/5/6/10 configurations. A single 1 GB flash memory Disk-On-Memory (DOM) module is used to store firmware and applications. This acts like the system drive, yet it takes up very little space and uses almost no power.

The EonNAS 1100 is aimed right at small business owners more than the advanced home user, mainly because it does not include or support any of the typical applications for media streaming or remote access. Infortrend is very up-front about the focus for this product, and it's for business applications only. If your business is photographic imaging, video, or music production, by all means take advantage of the enhanced data integrity offered by the ZFS file system on the EonNAS series. Just don't expect to serve your multimedia files up to your colleagues and customers with TwonkyServer.

Benchmark Reviews has tested quite a few NAS products, ranging from the QNAP TS-119 NAS single-disk offering made for home users, to the Goliath QNAP TS-879U-RP 8-Bay NAS for the storage needs of large businesses. We've also tested the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ v2 NAS server recently, which falls in the middle between those two extremes. Let's see how this 4-bay rackmount NAS compares to its competitors.

Closer Look: EonNAS 1100 NAS Server

The bottom line with any high performance storage solution is that the number of drive spindles in play is often more important than almost any other factor, assuming that everything else is based on reasonably modern technology. When you combine the higher level of performance with the greater flexibility for online RAID capacity expansion & online RAID level migration, the additional cost of the extra drive bays always looks like a bargain instead of conspicuous consumption. This is the reason more and more people are opting for NAS systems with at least four bays, even though they may not need all that capacity now. What initially looks like overkill in a NAS system might just be the very thing that saves the day some years down the road.

We've all got data that we can't live without, the question is, how long do you want to be without it? Very few people or businesses are going to want to live without their important information for any length of time, and a RAID configuration that includes some redundancy is undoubtedly called for. With multiple SATA drives installed, you can have: RAID 0 (Disk Striping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring), RAID 5 (Block-level striping with distributed parity), RAID 6 (Block-level striping with redundant distributed parity), and RAID 10 (Striped array whose segments are RAID 1 arrays). The most popular choice is usually RAID 5 because it offers the highest capacity with built-in redundancy. RAID 6 offers additional redundancy, allowing for continued operation even with two simultaneous drive failures. RAID 6 is very popular for larger NAS units and mission-critical data stores, because if one individual drive fails in a RAID 5 implementation, the array instantly starts operating as a RAID 0 configuration, which has NO redundancy. It stays in that vulnerable state until the array is rebuilt, which is a slow process that generally taxes the system and the remaining drives to the max, and can take several hours to complete.

The EonNAS 1100 is a relatively small unit, arranged in a 19" rack mount format and fitting in a single, 1U rack space. This is clearly not going to be a useful format for a large variety of home settings, but business users will have no problem integrating it into their systems. The only available model is a diskless unit, which allows the end user to select the most some sensible drive combination that's compatible with their storage needs. The size and weight are consistent with similar equipment in a data center: 43mm (H) x 439mm (W) x 511mm (D), and 7 kg (15 lb) without drives installed. Each HDD you install will add about 1-1/2 pounds, depending on your choice of drive. Many users will be looking at 2TB and 3TB drives for a unit like this, and they're heavier than most. There are no handles on the unit, but there are optional rail kits available for easy and secure mounting in a standard 19" rack.

All of the front panel controls and drive bays are accessible from the front of the unit; there is no access door or other shield to contend with. In a device as small as this, there really isn't room for a display on the front, just a few push buttons and indicator lights. The four drive bays span the entire width of the unit, and take up at least two thirds of the height, as well. On the far left side of the front panel are the ON/OFF button, a warning indicator, and then two LEDs for showing the status of the GbE network connections. They glow steady during idle conditions, and blink when data is being transmitted through the ports. There are ventilation holes in both the drive trays and across a good portion of the upper front panel. There are no ventilation holes on the sides, top, or bottom of the EonNAS 1100 chassis. All the cooling air enters at the front of the unit and is exhausted out the rear by three 40mm fans - one in the PSU and two controlled by the NAS. There are no filters on any of the air intakes, presumably because the air in most data centers is cleaner than in your home. No cat hair, for one thing, but I have seen some dust bunnies.....

With the unit safely turned off, it's OK to remove one or more drives and they all slide out the front like this. Each tray holds one individual drive in the EonNAS 1100, and the tray is a common part across the product line. Inserting and removing the drive trays was smooth and positive, both with HDDs mounted in the trays and without. There are individual locking devices on each of the latches, and no keys are required to operate them, but you will need a small screwdriver or a similar tool. My advice is to use the locks and think twice before unlatching any drive bay. Trust me when I say that you do not want to start accidentally pulling drives out. The drive bays are not marked on the front bezel, the individual drive trays are not marked, and you can mix and match them all you want, until you build a drive array and then you had better remember which one goes where. I recommend making your own labels or marking the trays with a Sharpie as soon as you start installing drives into the unit; if you mix them up the NAS might not recognize the array, and you could end up destroying data. In the Hardware manual, Infortrend indicates that the far left hand bay is considered Drive Slot 1. There is an exception to this, and Infortrend calls it "Disk Roaming". If you physically migrate your data from one NAS system to another, you don't have to retain the existing order of the drives in the new chassis. I don't know if this works when you're just dealing with the original chassis. The latches acted like a locking device and a lever; once the trays reached the end of their travel, swinging the latch levers the tray firmly into place. It's a sturdy, well designed system for getting the drives in and out. Not that you want to take them out very often, maybe just for spring cleaning once a year!

Around the back of the EonNAS 1100, you can see all of the hardwired I/O points. Starting at the far left is a video connectors for VGA. This is not used during normal operation, only in factory maintenance mode, which is not accessible by the user. Directly to the right is one of the 40mm smart fans, followed by one of the captive screws for keeping the top panel locked in place. Next up are a pair of 1000BASE-T Ethernet jacks, four USB 2.0 jacks, and a single eSATA connector. Further to the right are another 40mm fan opening, and then the integrated 250W power supply, with its own fan and IEC receptacle. There is no separate power switch on the rear panel, only the ON/OFF button on the front. Since this is strictly a business device, there's no spot for a Kensington lock hole. In order to keep things cool when needed and quiet the rest of the time, the fan speed is modulated. I haven't paid much attention to fan noise in most of the smaller NAS models I've reviewed, as it was never really noticeable during my daily use. The EonNAS 1100 was like the other rackmount devices I've tested. None were as quiet as the NAS units intended for domestic use, and the fan noise stood out against the background noise of my study, above the noise of two PCs operating in the same room. The main problem is that the form factor only allows very small (40mm) fans to be used, and small fans that can move a decent amount of air are always going to be noisier than a larger fan with the same CFM rating.

The far right side of the front panel has an external USB 2.0 jack and a dedicated push button control for initiating a quick backup sequence. There's a small bi-color LED in the center of the button that provides status updates during one-touch backup activity. Green is good, amber is bad. Details for this function are configured in the device software. The backup operation can work either way, backing up from the USB device to the NAS, or from the NAS to the USB device. This image also shows the two LED indicators that are present on each of the four drive trays. They're actually acrylic light pipes that snake their way back to LEDs on the backplane PC board. The lower LED is steady green when there's a working drive in the bay; it turns red if there's a problem with the drive. The upper LED blinks blue when there is drive activity occurring in that bay.

Now that we've had a thorough tour of the exterior, let's do a complete tear-down and see what the insides look like. The next section covers Insider Details.

Insider Details: EonNAS 1100 NAS Server

The insides of these things are always more interesting than the outsides, at least to me. The EonNAS 1100 came apart very quickly and easily, with just two captive screws needing to be released in order to remove the rearmost top panel. Once they're loosened, the top panel slides a bit to the rear and then lifts off, revealing most of the internal parts. Further disassembly requires a screwdriver or two. The main controller board takes up about a quarter of the space that isn't consumed by the drive bays, and many of the functions are integrated on the one board, including most of the back panel connectors. There is a full-width backplane located at the border between the front and rear sections, where all the SATA connections for the drives are mounted, and there are pass-through connectors for power, SATA, and the front panel controls and indicators. The main controller PC board is held in place by screws, as are most of the other components in this section. The 1GB DOM board is on the left and the 250W power supply is on the far right. The power supply has several unused connectors tucked away against the side panel. The two 40mm system fans straddle the main controller board and sit tight up against the rear panel, while the third fan is integrated into the power supply chassis.

The location of the backplane PCB makes more sense when you pull the remaining top cover off the unit, which means removing 13 screws. The drive bays need to be rigid, so they can support the heavy hard drives, and Infortrend has built a sturdy front end into the EonNAS 1100. There are more cables than I'm used to seeing in a four-bay NAS, but the layout is clean and well-constructed.

The inside of the drive bays shows a higher level of build quality than I've seen before. Everyone else is using formed sheet metal structures for the guides on the drive bay, and Infortrend is using thick, machined aluminum bar stock. In combination with the slick plastic on the drive trays, it's a smooth ride for the hard drives as they are inserted into the drive bay, and finally mate with the SATA connectors at the rear. The top cover is screwed directly to these heavy bars, to form a very rigid enclosure for the entire front section. The thin, pizza-box format of this NAS unit requires a different style of construction than the tower-style models we're used to reviewing, and Infortrend made some good choices on the mechanical design.

The main controller board is densely populated, not as much as a high performance video card, but the majority of the parts on the EonNAS 1100 board are there to provide a unique set of functions. A video card PCB has at least 25% of the surface consumed by power regulation and distribution hardware. Two passively cooled heatsinks (sorry, one's missing in this photo) cover the main chips supplied by Intel, the Dual-Core D525 Atom CPU, and the ICH9R Southbridge that provides the SATA connections and the RAID logic. These two ICs do the bulk of the work for this NAS device; the only other chips that are even moderately stressed are the memory and the Ethernet controllers. There are a couple of unused functions on the right hand side of the board, namely an eSATA port and the 1x PCIe expansion slot connector. The 9-pin D-Sub connector located towards the bottom is probably used for initial setup at the factory, if at all.

From the side, the size of the CPU heatsink is a little more obvious, once you can see the height of the thing. It's still indicative of a low power solution, which is the Intel Atom's forte, even the Dual-Core models. The limited cooling required for the two hardest working chips on the controller board is made even more obvious once you remove the heatsink and see the type of thermal interface materials in use. The ICH9R Southbridge is thermally connected to the heatsink with that hard, plasticky material that we used to see on low-end video cards in the '80s and '90s. At least the assembly process and the viscosity of the material worked together to produce a thin interface layer. That's better than a 1mm thick layer of the good stuff, perhaps.

The power supply unit is a rather thin model from Delta Electronics and is rated for 250 watts of output. The main outputs are 3.3V, two 5V rails, and +/- 12V. There is only a single PSU, so no redundancy or hot swap functionality is available. The unit has a full range input, with auto-switching between the nominal 115V, 208V, and 230V AC power feeds commonly encountered in various parts of the world. There is no dedicated power switch integrated into the power input module, just an IEC receptacle. There's no safety requirement for the switch, and from the user viewpoint, it's one less switch to worry about.

So far we've had a good look at what there is to observe as far as hardware goes, but let's dig down one more layer, down to the chip level where the technology really starts to get interesting. I love my shiny hardware just as much as the next person, but it's only half the story....

Technology Details: EonNAS 1100 NAS Server

The EonNAS 1100 uses one of the slightly older "Pineview" Intel Atom Dual-Core CPUs based on 45nm fabrication technology, the D525. Introduced in June of 2010, the D525 runs at the faster clock frequency of 1.86 GHz, compared to the original Dual-Core model, the D510. The newer "Cedarview" CPUs from Intel mostly use their 32nm technology to reduce power and heat, not to generate higher performance, so there's very little penalty involved by using the older CPU here. The integrated graphics controller runs at a relatively slow clock speed of 400 MHz, which also isn't really important for this NAS, since it doesn't normally output video. Lastly, the 1MB Intel Smart Cache and the integrated memory controller that supports DDR3-800 DRAM are both performance enhancing features. The package size is the familiar 22mm x 22mm, and the TDP is still a relatively low 13W. The CPU does not support the AES NI extensions for encryption, so don't expect to be able to encrypt your disks without a severe performance penalty.

The biggest chip on the board is actually not the CPU, it's the SATA interface/ RAID controller chip. Infortrend chose a SATA controller that's ubiquitous in the PC world, but not as common in the NAS environment. Intel's ICH9R is not as widely used as the ICH10R as a RAID controller in x86 PCs, just because the ICH10R was attached as the Southbridge to more high-end Intel CPUs and motherboards. People who put together RAID solutions on their PC tend to buy higher-end motherboards, which almost always came supplied with the ICH10R Southbridge. There's very little performance difference between the two I/O Controller Hubs with regards to RAID operation, especially when connected to an Atom CPU. Short of doing a full blown custom ASIC, it's hard to beat the performance of this mainstream solution, which was developed back when the most common way of increasing disk throughput was to RAID several HDDs together. Today's Southbridges (err.... Platform Hub Controllers) are rightly judged more by their ability to squeeze the utmost performance out of the latest SSDs, but the ICH9R served admirably during the transition period between high speed spindles and flash memory.

The EonNAS uses a 1GB Disk-on-Module (DOM) as the boot device. It's built and configured with a USB interface rather than IDE or SATA, courtesy of the Silicon Motion SM325QF flash memory controller. As an outboard device, it's easier to interface it this way; if the DOM was integrated on the motherboard, I would expect to see the more traditional disk interface being used. Serving up a Sun Solaris operating system to a 1.86 GHz Atom CPU is the dog's life for a flash memory chip; this module never breaks a sweat.

The two Gigabit Ethernet controllers are supplied by Marvell and they incorporate both Media Access Control (MAC) and a Physical Layer (PHY) port. Each 88E8059 chip supports one Ethernet jack on the rear panel, and connects to the rest of the system by an x1 PCIe Rev. 1.1a interface. The relatively new IC is based on the well-known Marvell Alaska^® PHY and features 10/100/1000BASE-T and IEEE 802.3 compliance, with auto-negotiation support for the IEEE 802.3ab Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP).

Last, but not least is the 4 GB of DDR3-1333 memory that is standard on the EonNAS 1100; it's carried on the SO-DIMM form factor and is addressed by the CPU in Single-Channel mode. The Atom D525 CPU can only support DDR3-800 but the SO-DIMM module supplied by Apacer is rated for DDR3-1333 with timings of 9-9-9 for CL-tRCD-tRP. The eight SDRAM chips themselves are H5TQ2G83CFR ICs from Hynix.

We've seen the ins and outs of the hardware, and the technology under the hood; now let's take a quick look through the list of features that you get with the EonNAS 1100. The next couple of sections are somewhat shorter than we're used to seeing with consumer-grade NAS systems, and it's critical to understand what features you get with these units, and what you don't. It's not just a box full of drives; it's capable of more than that.

EonNAS 1100 NAS Server Features

As the volume of personal and business data continue to rise exponentially, the systems we use to store and manage it have become more complex. I started my long relationship with computers when program storage meant a shoebox full of punch cards. Now, a bare-bones PC starts off with almost a million files on it BEFORE you add your own data. I'm not going to tell you that computing is going to get any simpler, that's an outright lie, but I can say that the tools we use to manage them are going to make it easier. We'll look at the newest and most unique features first, and then cover some of the more common ones.

ZFS File System

Data Rot! Ever hear that term? No? I would say, "Consider yourself lucky", but the truth is most of us have experienced it in one form or another. Every time one of your old floppy drives gave up the ghost and you lost part of a file, you experienced it. The trouble is, we all thought the problem went away when we got rid of "soft" media like tape, and it's circular cousin, the floppy disk. All digital storage technologies: CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HDD, SSD, NAND - they're all susceptible to data rot, or bit rot, as it's sometimes called. Fortunately, the people who create, deploy, and maintain large data centers have been aware of this issue for a long time, and have devised ways of dealing with it. Now, for the first time, those techniques are being made available to the general consumer, with some innovative new products from Infortrend. The key to maintaining a consistently high level of data integrity is found in the ZFS file system employed in all three models in the EonNAS 1000 series. ZFS features an extensive hierarchical checksum strategy, which eliminates what is often called "silent" data corruption with self-healing storage algorithms. Operating way down at the file system level, ZFS attacks data rot where it starts, at the bit, byte, and block level.

Deduplication

The EonNAS 1000 series has another significant feature inherited from the big iron storage solutions - Deduplication. Infortrend has implemented both file-level and block-level deduplication in these new NAS models, which has the potential to reduce storage requirements by up to 70% with typical SOHO or SMB data. That means you can possibly store 10TB of data on 3TB of disk space, without using bit-level file compression techniques. It all depends on how much of your data is repetitive, but if you think about email for instance, you can easily imagine the tremendous amount of duplication that's present in most organization's email traffic. The same thing happens when you want to maintain sequential backup files, let's say the last 10 days' worth. This is a common way of mitigating against data loss that isn't always immediately obvious. With multiple, full daily backups, you have the ability to unwind your data stream back to the exact day when the loss took place, rather than having to choose between yesterday's and last week's version of data. With deduplication, ten days of daily backups need only consume a little more than a single snapshot.

Deduplication is set up on each of the Share folders, individually. You don't have to apply it to the entire RAID Volume, or "Pool". During testing, I ended up configuring all of the shares with deduplication enabled, just so I could see the maximum possible benefit, in terms of space reduction. I copied the same set of RAR-compressed data into multiple folders, and was able to achieve a deduplication ratio of 95%, which is on the extreme high end of what is achievable. EonNAS claims that space reduction gains of up to 90% are possible with backup applications, 70% is the high end for virtualized environments, and 40% is realistic for storing common office applications, like documents, spreadsheets, and databases. Email is another animal, and gains there will probably be at least 70%. It all depends on how much block and file duplication is hiding inside your data. The use of block comparison in addition to file comparisons will increase opportunities for deduplication beyond what you might initially guess.

The deduplication process works as new data is written to the NAS. It is done "in-line" so to speak, and is definitely not done on a batch basis. If you have data in a share folder already, and then enable the deduplication capability, the existing data will be unaffected. However, any new data added to the share will be compared to ALL the existing data in that share as it is being written. This is quite different from how most file compression schemes are implemented, so be aware that once data is written to the share, it cannot be reduced in size by the deduplication function. Depending on the type of data you need to store, data compression may give you better reductions in storage space, but the trend for business operations has been towards deduplication lately, because of the massive amounts of duplicate data that are generally found in common business systems, like email servers.

Snapshot

Snapshot techniques work similar to drive cloning, except it allows for differential copies to be made. This greatly reduces the amount of disk space required, yet it allows the user to restore full volumes, folders, or files. If you're familiar with how Microsoft creates Restore Points in Windows, it's pretty much the same. The difference is, with the EonNAS 1100, you control how and when the snapshots are created. Snapshots are one of the few ways to protect against human error or rogue employees who try to delete critical business data.

Remote Replication

Remote replication is available via the rsync protocol. This common protocol allows you to replicate your data on a folder-by-folder basis to another location. You options with the EonNAS 1100 are: 1) within the same NAS, 2) to another EonNAS system, 3) to another network device that supports rsync. Data is transferred in a compressed format, to speed network transmissions, and most businesses will want to take advantage of the 128-bit encryption that's available on the EonNAS series. This option works well when the business is comfortable with the possibility of losing a finite time of data, defined by a time period, say 2 hours, or 4 hours. The term Remote in the title refers to the fact that most businesses will use this technique to create physically remote copies of their data, to be used in typical Disaster Recovery scenarios, such as a power outage or fire in their main data center. This type of replication scheme is referred to as an Asynchronous protocol, since it only synchs at certain times, and doesn't stay continually synchronized.

Pool Mirror

Stepping up a notch in the Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity hierarchy, the EonNAS 1000 series supports real-time data replication between two EonNAS systems. The term Mirror is appropriate, as the data on each system is always a mirror image of the other. This is the highest level of data protection you can get, and the level of synchronization is only constrained by the bandwidth of your network.

Data Backups

Sometimes a data backup is only the starting point, and sometimes it's the endpoint. Either way, you need a secure and efficient application to generate the backup files. The EonNAS 1100 series ships with four (4) licenses for FarStone TotalRecovery Pro backup software, and a copy of the application is included on the product CD in the shipping box. The EonNAS 1000 series is also compatible with a wide range of other third party backup applications. The Apple Time Machine is also supported, as a hardware/software hybrid alternative. The EonNAS device itself can also do simple backups to eSATA or USB drives attached to its own ports.

Now that we've loooked at the most significant features of the EonNAS 1100, let's look at the Hardware and Software specifications that provide the power and performance to make those features run.

EonNAS 1100 Hardware Specifications

Hardware Specifications

EonNAS 1100 Software Specifications

The EonNAS 1000 Series is designed for small businesses - period. However, I also contend that the typical home environment looks very similar to a small business, anyways. When you have to combine the latest high tech devices, the legacy hardware and applications that everyone still has hanging around, the need to grant granular access to multiple terabytes of data with varying sensitivity, unified communications, and peripheral sharing - it's a daunting challenge. I also challenge you to tell me whether that last sentence refers to a small business or your own home network.

There are a great number of software features included with the EonNAS 1100 that some users will never use, never see, and never even know they exist. You can be sure though, that every corporate sys/admin is looking through this list of software capabilities and checking off the required boxes for deploying a NAS in a secure, large-scale business environment.

Software Specifications

Protocols

CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS, FTP, HTTP/HTTPS, iSCSI, SNMP, NDMP, NTP, ICAP

Client Operating System Support

Server Virtualization

File System

Networking

Security

RAID and Volume Management

Power Management

Access Right Management

System Management

Data Protection

Browser Support

File Server

FTP Server

Backup Server

EonNAS 1100 NAS Server Setup & Usage

The first thing you need to do with most NAS devices is discover them on your network and set them up. Most NAS vendors bundle a small, lightweight "finder" application with their products that has some system utilities included. The EonNAS NASFinder2.2 app provides Device Discovery, System Login, Network Configuration, Storage Configuration, User Account Setup, and Share directory setup, all before you log in to the full monitoring & control application via a standard web browser. The finder app cycles through all these sub-menus during initial setup; once you do that, the setup wizard is always available in case you forget your password or need to reconfigure the NAS. Otherwise, just use your browser and login to the IP address that the NAS is configured to; the default address is 10.0.0.2 for the first Ethernet port. Once setup is complete, the NASFinder app will show you a summary of your initial settings at the end, so you can double check that everything's set the way you want it.

Once the initial setup is complete, you need to log in to the main admin application, which is accessed by typing the IP Address of the NAS device into your browser. The areas you can control are divided up into the following groups:

• Status
• Configuration
• Storage
• Folder
• Account
• Backup
• Maintenance
  

Each of these menu items is broken down further, as you can see below. If you read through the entire Software Features section, then the number of sub-menus should not be a surprise for you. I can only fit about half of the menu tree on the screen, but you get the idea.

The individual menu items are also available in a larger window to the right of the menu tree. There's an opportunity to view a brief description of the function before you start clicking on anything. Here's what the System maintenance screen looks like:

One of the critical aspects of setting up a NAS is the networking configuration. It's so easy to get it wrong and accidentally shut down access, that Infortrend includes tools in their setup wizard application, which you can still access after you have inadvertently locked yourself out. If you get it completely out of whack, it's still possible to recover by using the system reset function, which can be accessed on the rear panel. Once you navigate to the Network Configuration screen, you can change global settings and individual settings for each of the Ethernet ports available on the system. Manual and DHCP setting of port addresses is allowed, and I ended up setting static IP addresses for this NAS, so that I could run separate data paths through a network switch. IPv4 and IPv6 are both accommodated and the two integral ports are labeled "LAN1" and "LAN2"; no other ports will be listed since there is no expansion slot available for additional NICs on the EonNAS 1100.

A separate Network Trunking menu allows two or more ports to be linked together and configured for 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) mode. The two ports on the EonNAS 1100 are easily linked and unlinked, by using these tools, but may require a restart to be fully functional. All testing in this review was done with single port connections, to keep the playing field level. I have had very mixed results so far using LACP on a variety of NAS products; it's not a simple plug-and-play way to double your throughput, that's for sure.

Infortrend uses the concept of storage "pools" to manage drive allocations. This does not replace RAID volumes, but works with them to provide more management options. One major benefit to this method is that the EonNAS can quickly and easily migrate from a single disk configuration to a fully populated RAID system without having to backup your data to a separate drive. I went from a single disk configuration to a four-disk RAID 5 system in less than five minutes, without losing any data that was on the single disk. I've only tested one other NAS that could do this, but that unit took many hours (6-8) for the disks to resynchronize, after I added additional drives. I used to think this was just a nice feature for reviewers, who have to test with multiple disk configurations, but I had a forum exchange recently that highlighted how useful this capability is during data migrations. During a "normal" setup, the NASFinder software will ask you to select the desired RAID configuration at startup, and you can choose the one that fits your needs the best. The only option you might miss is the use of a hot spare with RAID 5. Personally, I think RAID 6 is a better choice if you need that level of assurance and only have four drive bays to work with. You might also notice that RAID 10 is missing from this setup screen. To make a striped set of mirrors, which is the very definition of RAID 10 You have to build a single RAID 1 (mirrored set), and then add another RAID1 set to it in striped mode. Definitely not as easy as selecting a radio button, but it's all explained in the manual.

Ok, if you've been following along this far, there's not much more I can show you except how fast it is. So let's get down to some benchmarking, and compare it to a variety of other NAS products that we've looked at recently.

Network Terminology

Benchmark Reviews primarily uses metric data measurement for testing storage products, for anyone who is interested in learning the relevant history of this sore spot in the industry, I've included a small explanation below:

The basic unit data measurement is called a bit (one single binary digit). Computers use these bits, which are composed of ones and zeros, to communicate their contents. All files are stored as binary files, and translated into working files by the Operating System. This two number system is called a "binary number system". In comparison, the decimal number system has ten unique digits consisting of zero through nine. Essentially it boils down to differences between binary and metric measurements, because testing is deeply impacted without carefully separating the two. For example, the difference between the transfer time of a one-Gigabyte (1000 Megabytes) file is going to be significantly better than a true binary Gigabyte (referred to as a Gibibyte) that contains 1024 Megabytes. The larger the file used for data transfer, the bigger the difference will be.

Have you ever wondered why your 500 GB hard drive only has about 488 GB once it has been formatted? Most Operating Systems utilize the binary number system to express file data size, however the prefixes for the multiples are based on the metric system. So even though a metric "Kilo" equals 1,000, a binary "Kilo" equals 1,024. Are you confused yet? Don't be surprised, because even the most tech savvy people often mistake the two. Plainly put, the Kilobyte is expressed as 1000 bytes, but it is really comprised of 1,024 bytes.

Most network engineers are not fully aware that the IEC changed the way we calculate and name data chunks when they published the new International Standards back in December 1998. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) removed the old metric prefixes for multiples in binary code with new prefixes for binary multiples made up of only the first two letters of the metric prefixes and adding the first two letters of the word "binary". For example, instead of Megabyte (MB) or Gigabyte (GB), the new terms would be Mebibyte (MiB) or Gibibyte (GiB). While this is the new official IEC International Standard, it has not been widely adopted yet because it is either still unknown by institutions or not commonly used.

NAS Testing Methodology

All the NAS devices we test cannot accommodate all the different disk configurations, so our current test protocol has been based on two of the most popular setups: a basic (single) disk and RAID-5 configurations. Most NAS products that can support RAID 5 go beyond the minimum number of drive bays, to a total of four, so that is the number of drives that I typically use to test with, even though I could get by with only three. During initial setup, the NAS was tested for the latest firmware by checking the Infortrend website The firmware installed on the EonNAS 1100 was v1.4.55 when I received it, which is the most current version.

Normally, I connect the NAS directly to an Intel Gigabit CT Desktop LAN controller in the test-bench system, with ten-foot CAT6 patch cables. I've recently upgraded my test environment with a business-class GS110T Smart Switch from NETGEAR, which offers high throughput along with a wide array of configuration options that the typical unmanaged network switch can't touch. I set all the components up with static IP addresses in the 192.168.xxx.yyy range. I did a couple throughput tests and saw no appreciable differences in transfer speeds, so I stuck with the more realistic network arrangement for testing. At the transfer speeds I was seeing, the single GbE connection wasn't holding the unit back, so I feel comfortable using this setup for all future testing.

With the networking taken care of, the next potential bottleneck that needed attention is the disk system on the host PC. In earlier tests, I relied on the third generation OCZ Agility SSD, which is good for at least 500 MB/s, input or output, on the appropriate Intel Platform Controller Hub. While I was doing some testing with an 8-bay monster NAS and 10GbE connections, I decided it was time to bypass the SSD on the test rig and install a RAM Disk. There are at least a dozen products on the market that will create and manage a RAM Disk on Windows systems; I chose RAMDisk v3.5.1.130R22 from Dataram based on performance tests in several reviews (we read 'em, too....) and its reasonable cost structure. I needed to assign at least 10GB of space to the RAM Disk, in order to replicate the test protocol I've been using for all my NAS testing, so none of the freeware products looked suitable. One other trick was necessary, to get the RAM Disk to transfer files larger than 2GB, I had to use the "Convert" utility in Windows to make the RAM Disk into an NTFS volume. Then I was able to perform the file transfers with 10GB files, no problem. If you want to avoid this extra step, be sure to look for a RAM Disk product that directly supports the NTFS file system.

For basic throughput evaluation, the NAS product received one test transfer followed by at least three timed transfers. Each test file was sent to the Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB (WD7502AAEX) hard drives installed in the NAS for a timed NAS write test, and that same file was sent back to the RAM Disk in the test system to perform a NAS read test. Each test was repeated several times, the high and low values were discarded and the average of the remaining results was recorded and charted.

The Read and Write transfer tests were conducted on each NAS appliance using the 1 GB file and then a 10 GB file. A second set of tests are conducted with Jumbo Frame enabled, i.e. the MTU value for all the Ethernet controllers is increased from 1500 to 9000. Most of the NAS products tested to date in the Windows 7 environment have supported the Jumbo Frame configuration. Only the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ v2 uses the 1500 MTU setting by default, and has no user-accessible controls to change that; you'll see that reflected in the charts. I used a single GbE for all tests; I have not yet been able to achieve consistent results with all units using the IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) mode.

I also ran the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) version 1.7.1, which was originally designed to run on a Windows XP client. People smarter than me have figured out how to run it under Windows 7, including the 64-bit version that is used more often than the 32-bit version these days. NASPT brings an important perspective to our test protocol, as it is designed to measure the performance of a NAS system as viewed from the end user's viewpoint. Benchmarks like ATTO use Direct I/O Access to accurately measure disk performance with minimal influence from the OS and the host platform. This provides important, objective data that can be used to measure raw, physical performance. While it's critical to measure the base performance, it's also important to quantify what you can expect using real-world applications, and that's exactly what NASPT does. One of the disadvantages of NASPT is that it is influenced by the amount of memory installed on the client, and it was designed for systems that had 2-4 GB of RAM. Consequently, two of the tests give unrealistic results, because they are measuring the speed of the buffer on the client, instead of the actual NAS performance. For that reason, we will ignore the results for "HD Video Record" and "File Copy to NAS". I'm also not going to pay too much attention to the "Content Creation" test, as it is too heavily focused on computing tasks that aren't really handled by the NAS.

Benchmark Reviews also measures NAS performance using some tests that are traditionally used for internal drives. The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads, which allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

We are continuing our NAS testing with the exclusive use of Windows 7 as the testing platform for the host system. The performance differences between Win7 and XP are huge, as we documented in our QNAP TS-259 Pro review. The adoption rate for Win 7 is very high, and Benchmark Reviews has been using Win 7 in all of our other testing for some time now. It was definitely time to make the jump for NAS products.

NAS Comparison Products

• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-219P+ Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-259 Pro Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server

Support Equipment

• (4) Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 750GB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
• Intel EXPI9301 CT Gigabit Ethernet NIC, x1 PCIe 1.1, 1x CAT5
• Intel E10G42BT, X520-T2, 10Gbps Ethernet NIC, PCIe 2.0 x8, 2x CAT6a
• NETGEAR 10-port GbE Smart Switch GS110T
• Dataram RAMDisk v3.5.1.130R22
• Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) version 1.7.1
• ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0
• 10-Foot Category-6 Solid Copper Shielded Twisted Pair Patch Cable
• 1 metric Gigabyte Test File (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes)
• 10 metric Gigabyte Test File (10 GB = 10,000,000,000 bytes)

Test System

• Motherboard: MSI Z68-Express Z68A-GD80 (1.23.1108 BIOS)
• System Memory: 4x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600MHz (9-9-9-24)
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (BX80623I52500K)
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Venomous-X (Delta AFB1212SHE PWM Fan)
• Video: Intel HD Graphics 3000
• Drive 1: OCZ Agility3 SSD 120GB (AGT3-25SAT3-120G)
• Optical Drive: Sony NEC Optiarc DVD (AD-7190A-OB 20X)
• Enclosure: Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P50R
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-750TX ATX12V V2.2 750Watt
• Monitor: SOYO 24"; Widescreen LCD Monitor (DYLM24E6) 1920X1200
• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate Version 6.1 (Build 7600)

1GB Single-Disk Test Results

The bottom line for any storage device is the combination of capacity and transfer speed. For a network attached storage server, the differences are all about the infrastructure that is placed around the basic HDD array. Since capacity is something that's easy to define and measure, the real question for any NAS product is how fast will it Read and Write data. For this reason, Benchmark Reviews primarily measures NAS performance as the bandwidth achieved during a file transfer test. The first tests we perform utilize a single 1GB (1000 megabytes / 1,000,000,000 bytes) file in a transfer to and from the NAS.

With all the NAS units operating in single disk mode, many of the units have broadly similar performance. The differences are mostly down to CPU performance in this test, although some of the other infrastructure ICs do have an impact. The EonNAS 1100 is about 10MB/s behind most of the QNAP systems in the single disk read test. It's also about 10 MB/s faster than the ReadyNAS NV+ v2 device, so it's running in the middle of the pack here. The chart looks worse for the EonNAS 1100 than it really is, just because the QNAP's outnumber all the other NAS devices. Most devices performed better on the 1GB Read test with Jumbo Frames enabled, and the EonNAS is no exception, with an average read speed of 75.5 MB/s with Jumbo Frames and 71.8 MB/s without. Most people who buy a 4-bay NAS don't care too much about single disk performance, but it's useful to get an understanding of any possible issues with the basic architecture of the system. The EonNAS 1100 architecture falls behind slightly in Read performance; let's look at Write performance next.

Moving on to the 1 GB write bandwidth test, the EonNAS 1100 makes a big leap up in performance, especially with Jumbo Frames enabled. Some of the other units also had trouble in this test with the MTU at the normal setting of 1500, and it probably hurt the ReadyNAS NV+ v2 performance, too. With an average write speed of 95.8 MB/s, the EonNAS puts itself solidly in the second tier in 1GB Single-Disk Write performance. The QNAP TS-879U-RP posts the top numbers again, and in general, the Intel Atom-based models are performing better than the Marvell-based units.

Next up is 10 GB (1000 metric megabytes / 10,000,000,000 bytes) file transfer testing. Using the single-disk configuration in each NAS, and a Gigabit Ethernet connection, network throughput will be put to the test, and the effect of any system or hardware caches will be minimized.

10GB Single-Disk Test Results

Examining 10GB basic file transfer speeds, the mid-range QNAP models all got a boost, compared to the 1 GB file transfers. Their read speed went up by approximately 10 MB/s, to a combined average of 95 MB/s. The EonNAS only picked up a few extra MB/s when reading the larger file. Clearly none of these units were bothered by handling very large files, and most got a small boost. Later in our testing, we will look at some other NAS test protocols that feature small file sizes, which is a more common situation for backup applications. Once again, you get none of the advantages of redundancy with a single disk or JBOD configuration, and most NAS users will go for one of the RAID configurations. These figures are not exactly what the average user will experience; those will be seen later in our RAID 5 tests.

In our 10GB write performance tests, the performance of all the NAS units is similar to their showing with the smaller sized, 1 GB file. The EonNAS 1100 hits a slightly higher performance level, at 74.2/98.4 MB/s with 1500 and 9000 MTU values. What's really impressive here is the performance compared to all the other QNAP models running Intel Atom and Marvell CPUs. The EonNAS 1100 beats all of them at 9000 MTU by at least 15MB/s, which is a considerable margin. Performance without Jumbo Frames still lags behind, only achieving an average write speed of 74.2 MB/s. We'll have to validate this trend, with results from RAID5 testing, but it looks like Jumbo Frames is a key component to getting best performance from the EonNAS 1100.

Next we're going to look at RAID 5 performance, where the EonNAS will have to compete with some heavy-duty challengers from QNAP and Thecus. Since the QNAP TS-259 Pro and TS-219P+ don't support the RAID5 configuration that we normally use to test large format NAS products, we won't be including their results in this next comparison.

NAS Comparison Products

• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-219P+ Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-259 Pro Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server

1GB RAID 5 Test Results

If you've got more than three HDD spindle to put in play, it makes sense to use one of the more advanced RAID configurations. RAID 5 is one of the most popular setups, primarily due to the balance it exhibits between capacity and redundancy. Not surprisingly, most NAS units that can support more than three HDDs also support RAID 5, so it makes sense to use it for test purposes. Most NAS products that can support RAID 5 go beyond the minimum number of drive bays, to a total of four, so that is the number of drives that I typically use to test with, even though I could get by with only three. The Thecus N5550 has five bays and the QNAP TS-879U-RP has eight, which could offer increased performance over four-bay systems, but we want to test comparable configurations here. So, all systems are tested with the standard four disk contingent.

The results for RAID 5 Read testing show the EonNAS 1100 still slotted below the mid-range QNAP products. All of these NAS platforms do a credible job here, though. None of them could be called a poor performer in a typical READ scenario; it's typically the Write performance that separates the men from the not-so-men.

The 1 GB RAID 5 disk write test shows more clearly the strain that this particular RAID configuration puts on the NAS infrastructure. It's well known that RAID 5 write performance can be a weak point, with all the computation overhead involved and the extra parity bits that need to be calculated and written to each of the drives. The only way to overcome that is with raw computational horsepower, which is why the ARM-based models lag behind both the Intel Atom and Core i3 units. The EonNAS 1100 once more shows off its strong write performance, beating the Marvell-based NAS devices by 30-40MB/s. It's still a bit behind the top-performing models from QNAP and Thecus, but it's still playing in the same league as those NAS devices.
The NAS units with ARM-based CPUs really show their weakness in this test. It's an inescapable fact that the simplest assignment any NAS can perform is basic backup duty, and in order to do that task well, you need to buy the most powerful system to effectively reap the benefits of a multi-disk array. Don't scrimp on the NAS platform if you can help it.

Next up is 10 GB (1000 metric megabytes / 10,000,000,000 bytes) file transfer testing. Using the 4-disk RAID 5 configuration in each NAS, and a single Gigabit connection, network throughput will be put to the test, and the effect of any system or hardware caches will be minimized.

10GB RAID 5 Test Results

Looking at Read tests with a single 10GB file, the EonNAS continues to show that Write performance is its strong point, not reading. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a device that's going to be doing a lot of backup duty. The results still favor the more expensive models, even though it's not a 1:1 ratio of improvement with higher cost. In order to do substantially better than this, you have to upgrade the network connection; GbE is only good for 125 MB/s, on a theoretical basis.

Looking at Write tests with a single 10GB file, the results are not all that different from the 1 GB tests. The Thecus N5550 runs at almost exactly the same average speed, in fact the Jumbo Frame results are identical. The same goes for the QNAP TS-879U-RP; the 9000 MTU write speed is the same, whether handling 1 GB files or 10 GB ones. The EonNAS 1100 has the same average write speed with 10GB files, but the 9000 and 1500 MTU results are just a little closer to one another when handling the very large files. The TS-879U-RP just laughs at the additional load of four hard drives; the CPU utilization never got above 25% during this test. The EonNAS had to work a little harder, and the CPU was maxed out often during RAID 5 testing. The Marvell-based units always had the CPU maxed out in Write activity, and it really hurts their RAID performance.

As we wrap up the simple file transfer testing, it's pretty clear that the EonNAS 1100 is much better at writing large files to disk, than it is reading them. We may see different results as we look at other tests, because these 1GB and 10GB files used in this portion of testing are much larger and more highly compressed than what a typical SOHO would feed their NAS. That's one reason Benchmark Reviews has expanded our testing protocol for NAS systems, to use a wider range of test data that's already in common use. Let's take a look at one of those tests, developed by Intel specifically for testing NAS devices. Oddly enough, it's called the "Network Attached Storage Performance Test"; NASPT for short.

NAS Comparison Products

• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server

Intel NASPT Test Results

NASPT brings an important perspective to our test protocol, as it is designed to measure the performance of a NAS system, as viewed from the end user's perspective. Benchmarks like ATTO use Direct I/O Access to accurately measure disk performance with minimal influence from the OS and the host platform. This provides important, objective data that can be used to measure raw, physical performance. While it's critical to measure the base performance, it's also important to quantify what you can expect using real-world applications, and that's exactly what NASPT does. In keeping with the real-world scenario, I only run these tests on the RAID 5 configurations, since that is what most users with a mid-size NAS are going to use. It just doesn't make sense to run realistic test scenarios on unrealistic hardware configurations.

One of the disadvantages of NASPT is that it is influenced by the amount of memory installed on the client, and it was designed for systems that had 2-4 GB of RAM. Consequently, two of the tests give unrealistic results with modern systems, because they are measuring the speed of the buffer on the client, instead of the actual NAS performance. For that reason, we will completely ignore the results for "HD Video Record" and "File Copy to NAS". You can a batch run of 5 cycles through the tests, but my results turned out to be a bit slower than the individual runs. There seemed to be some wrinkles in the batch testing that don't show up on individual test runs, which is a bit of a pain, to be honest. The numbers in the chart below are an average of five separate runs, which I believe are more accurate than results from a consolidated batch run.

With a single, basic GbE interface in place, the results look somewhat similar to the first set of data I have from this test. No individual test gets very far past the ~ 120 MB/s theoretical barrier, but several of them are in the 70-90 MB/s range. Some of the tests have very low transfer rates, and that's due to the nature of the test. The Content Creation test for example, simulates a user creating a web page, accessing multiple sources for the content. The Directory Copy tests use several hundred directories and several thousand files to test a typical backup and restore scenario. That's one of the most real-world types of test, and it's useful for all of us to have a standard set of test data to use, because my directory of 1,000 random small files is never going to be the same as your directory of 1,000 random small files.

To summarize things, here are consolidated charts of the "Fast" NASPT tests, the "Medium-Speed" tests, and finally the "Slow" ones. First, the tests with relatively fast transfer rates. I should also mention that this set of three tests are all based on reading data from the NAS, as they are all HD Video Playback tests. The EonNAS 1100 struggles on this test, just like it did with the basic file transfer Read tests. No surprise here, as HD video files are some of the largest of the common file types that users normally deal with, so this set of tests is very similar to the ones we just ran. As the playback speed increases, the EonNAS gets closer to the performance of the other NAS units. At 1x playback speed, it reaches 61% of the highest result; at 4x playback speed, it gets up to 77% of the highest speed of the competition.

In the Medium-Speed tests, the EonNAS 1100 does much better in the tests that involve Writes to the NAS - HD Playback & Record, and Office Productivity. The File Copy From NAS test is another READ exercise, where the EonNAS slips back, compared to the other units. It's too bad that the NASPT tests that are predominately Write-based give unrealistic results, because that's where the EonNAS 100 really shines.

The "Slow" tests generally are slow because the file transfers are done with data sets that contain a bunch of small files of irregular size. In addition, the Directory Copy tests are accessing the file system index much more heavily than in the other tests. This adds a unique component that could be critically important for some users. The EonNAS puts in a very competitive and consistent performance on the two Directory Copy tests, coming in second place behind the more powerful and expensive TS-879U-RP.

The Directory Copy To NAS and Directory Copy From NAS results show a massive flip-flop on performance between the QNAP and the Thecus. I can't explain how or why there is such a reversal of fortune in the Directory Copy results, but this is a good demonstration of why it pays to look closely at your potential use cases when shopping for any H/W or S/W solution. The Photo Album test is a 100% READ test, using a bunch of small files of varying sizes, arranged in a complex directory structure. This is a very common type of dataset, and the Read performance of the EonNAS 1100 holds it back. I do have a hard time understanding what application or situation would be reading large numbers of photo files from the NAS, in a sequential manner. Plus, the device where they were being transferred would need to support high transfer speeds. But, it's a reasonable synthetic test with a very specific data type, and it shows relative performance, so I can't complain too much. It would have been nice to have a companion test that was Write-based, though.

The Intel NASPT benchmarking tool keeps illuminating nuances among the test specimens that other, less complex tests don't. The DIR Copy results are a good example, where there was wide variation between platforms once pressure was put on the file system indexes. Most of the tests give predictable and meaningful results that represent real-world scenarios, so I'm pleased that we started to use this benchmark.

NAS Comparison Products

• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server

Non-Traditional NAS Test Results

In addition to measuring simple timed transfers, to determine how fast it will read and write contiguous blocks of data, Benchmark Reviews also measures NAS performance using some tests that are traditionally used for internal drives. By mapping the EonNAS 1100 as a local drive, some of our favorite HDD/SSD benchmarking tools worked just fine. Just like the NASPT test suite, I only run these tests on the RAID 5 configuration, as that is the most realistic scenario for a system like this. Some NAS products don't work too well with this type of test program; even though they may have the ability to map the NAS device to a drive letter, they're still not treated like local drives by the Operating System. I didn't have that problem with the EonNAS unit, so let's look at some results...

ATTO Disk Benchmark Results

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

The EonNAS 1100 turned in a good performance on ATTO, reaching a peak Read speed of 99.8 MB/s and a peak Write speed of 99.9 MB/s. These results are below the very top tier of NAS performance, and part of that is due to the additional load the ZFS file system puts on the hardware. The leader so far in sequential performance is the Thecus N5550, which has a very similar set of hardware powering the device, and the Linux operating system inside of it definitely offers a speed advantage in the typical NAS device.

It's good to keep in mind that these ATTO tests are not always indicative of real-world performance, due to the sequential access mode used. In most cases, the results are going to be close to the numbers achieved in timed Read and Write tests. They are also going to be way above the results from some of the more challenging tests in the Intel NASPT suite. It's interesting to note that roughly 95% of the maximum performance level was reached by the 32 kB block size. That's a sign of good RAID management, and the high performance hard drives that are used in our testing.

CrystalDiskMark Results

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth read and write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

The combination of the EonNAS 1100 and four Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s generates some decent numbers in this test. It pulls a respectable 46.8 MB/s on sequential Read and a better result of 85.3 MB/s average on sequential Write tests. The 4k tests show very low numbers, but that's typical of HDDs, even in a RAID configuration. That's one of the huge advantages that SSDs bring to the table, is the ability to handle thousand of small data chunks very gracefully. But look at what happens when the Queue Depth is increased; the 4K:QD32 test is usually a killer for most storage systems, but the EonNAS scores a hefty 68.9 MB/s on Read, while Write is still down in the single digits at 7.6 MB/s.

All in all, these are a respectable set of results for Network Attached Storage. Sure, they're a bit lower than a true local drive connection, directly into the SATA controller on the motherboard. But, for a NAS device mimicking a local HDD, the EonNAS 1100 performs very well. A couple of the NAS devices we've tested are faster, but none of them offers the security and space saving features you get with the ZFS file system on the EonNAS series.

NAS Server Final Thoughts

My first and solemn duty is to remind everyone that relying on a collection of drives in any RAID configuration for data backup purposes is a huge error. RAID systems provide protection against loss of services, not loss of data. Several examples will illustrate the problem, I hope:

• the drive controller goes bad and corrupts the data on all the drives in the array
• the entire storage device is physically or electrically damaged by external forces
• the entire storage device is lost, stolen, or destroyed
• a single drive in a RAID 5 cluster dies and during the rebuild process, which puts higher stress on the remaining drives, a second drive fails
• floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. (AKA El Niño, Derecho)

All these points lead to the inescapable conclusion that multiple drives in a common system, in a single location do not provide effective and reliable data backup. Throughout this review I've talked about high-availability systems, and the EonNAS 1100 from Infortrend fits that description well, especially when employed in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 configuration. With a single drive failure, your data is still available and accessible. The NAS device stays online the entire time while the failed drive is replaced and the array is rebuilt. That's what RAID systems are designed to do. The inherent redundancy is not meant to serve as a backup file set. Remember, we're not talking about losing data here, we're only talking about the ability to keep working uninterrupted, if one or two drives should fail.

The EonNAS 1100 falls squarely in the business side of the marketplace, for a couple of reasons. All of the basic operating software and applications are strictly business. Forget about streaming HD video to your SmartTV or your iPhone. There's no current or planned support for using DLNA/UPnP digital devices. What you will find are interfaces for Active Directory, VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V virtualization, HTTPS and SSH, and iSCSI. All of the important IT boxes get checked, and none of the consumer ones. Infortrend offers no apologies for this, and are very clear that Data Integrity, Security, and Availability are the primary concerns that their product line addresses.

The home and small business network is going to stay on Gigabit Ethernet for awhile. The cost to upgrade switches and routers to 10 GbE is still cost prohibitive for everyone who doesn't have a dedicated LAN room with several racks full of equipment. This 4-bay NAS is sized for the smaller business, without tons of data. For the medium-sized business, or the small business that is data-centric, the EonNAS 1310 or EonNAS 1510 are a better fit, with their increased capacity, higher transfer speeds, 10GbE connectivity options, and redundant power supplies. If you're making that kind of investment in IT infrastructure, I hope this article highlighted the features of the EonNAS 1000 series. For the rest of us, this 4-bay GbE NAS offers high-end business features for the small business that's concerned about its data. This leads me to ask, "What small business isn't concerned about its data?"

So, what conclusions can we draw about this high performance, four-bay EonNAS 1100 NAS server? Click NEXT to find out, and discuss...

EonNAS 1100 Conclusion

Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. As Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusions, as they represent our product rating for the sample received which may differ from retail versions.

The performance of the EonNAS 1100 has to be considered in context. All of the other NAS devices it is being compared with are using the EXT file system, which does not offer any protection from data rot. The ZFS file system used on the EonNAS 1100 is known to consume more overhead resources, especially DRAM. Unfortunately, there's no way to level the playing field for testing purposes, so we are left with an imperfect comparison. That sort of thing happens all the time in the computing world; it's called progress, so we will just have to consume our benchmarks with a little salt sprinkled on them. During timed transfers of 1GB and 10GB files the EonNAS 1100 recorded Read speeds of 75 MB/s and Write speeds above 87 MB/s. These are the RAID 5 results, and the only ones that really matter, since I suspect 90%+ of all users will choose that operating mode. The Intel Atom D525 processor and the 4GB of SDRAM were often maxed out during these tests. The balancing act of capacity, speed and cost has to land somewhere, and Infortrend is making full use of the available hardware to support the power hungry ZFS file system. The dual GbE network interfaces are perfectly suitable for a small business, but the absence of USB 3.0 slows down data transfers to common external devices. eSATA is the better solution here, and there is one port available on the rear panel.

The 1U form factor of the four-bay EonNAS 1100 limits the amount of free space on the front panel. In normal use, the front panel is the only visible part of the unit, unless you walk around to the back of the rack. From that vantage point, a multitude of Ethernet cables will compromise your view of the back panel, anyway. On the front panel, the four drive trays span the entire width, and are nicely styled, with functional air scoops for bringing fresh air into the drive bays. The status LEDs for each HDD are easy to see, mounted on the right hand edge of each drive tray. The On/OFF button and status LEDs on the far left are easy to see when needed, but are subtle enough when you don't. All in all, it's one of the nicer styled pizza boxes I've seen, especially since it makes do with basic black. The wild colors you see in today's data centers are really something; purple and green and everything between. One USB connector is located on the far right, and I do wish the inside of it was blue, indicating USB 3.0. The side and top panels are bare, anodized aluminum, and will almost always be hidden from view.

The construction quality of the EonNAS 1100 consistent with its all-business mission statement. The drive trays are very nicely built, and slide in and out smoothly. The inner framework is a very sturdy design, especially in the area of the drive bays. The unit came apart easily when needed; 90% of the replacement parts can be accessed by removing two captive screws, and then the top cover. All the components were well aligned during assembly, and went back together the same way. The assembly techniques all showed evidence of good industrial practice, and parts were well finished, without any sharp edges. The backplane was well mounted, with rigid supports where they were needed. I also saw effective RFI shielding in all the places it was needed, and good airflow design. Infortrend provides a 3 Year warranty, which is quite reasonable.

The EonNAS 1100 is targeted to a well-established class of NAS users, the business community. What they've done with their latest round of products is to bring high-end information assurance features down to their base models. Very large data centers know from experience that some piece of data stored in their facility gets corrupted about every 15 minutes. That's the sort of thing that kept people awake at night, until they found a solution. Sun built the ZFS file system into their Unix-based operating system in 2005, and now it's one of the stars in the EonNAS product. The other thing that kept CIOs and IT Directors up at night was the exponential growth of non-structured data, most commonly, email. Once again, ZFS comes to the rescue, with deduplication capability that was incorporated in 2009. ZFS is also very good at managing snapshots, being both quick and space-efficient. Given all of these benefits, you might wonder why every NAS doesn't use ZFS. One of the reasons may be that porting ZFS to Linux means having to comply with BOTH the GNU General Public License, and the Sun CDDL, which isn't currently possible. Almost every NAS I've tested to date ran a custom Linux distro; the EonNAS 1100 is the first to run Solaris 11, a derivative of the original SunOS that pioneered ZFS. So, while the functionality and features of the EonNAS 1100 are strictly limited to its intended business role, they are extremely advanced and Infortrend is pioneering the availability of high-end data integrity tools in the low end of the marketplace.

As of December 2012 the EonNAS 1100 model was listed for $1089.99 at Newegg. It's also available from several storage integrators like Eaegis and Provantage. Given the unique data integrity features it has, the number of drive bays, the construction quality, and the performance it offers, I think that's a very attractive price for a small business that needs to keep its data safe. The IT crowd is going to see this as a huge bargain, compared to the big iron solutions that are the only alternative to keeping bit rot under control and taking a bite out of data growth with deduplication. Larger businesses will no doubt go for the two larger units in the EonNAS 1000 series.

Benchmark Reviews has enjoyed testing a variety of network storage solutions, and with the wide range of products on offer from a number of vendors, anyone in need of a NAS server can find one to fit their current and future needs. The biggest problem is choosing one; that's why we go into so much detail in our reviews, to help you figure out what level of performance and features is right for you. If you need a staggering array of features, consumer-focused applications, or 10GbE-class performance, then you need to look elsewhere to meet those needs. If you need the storage capacity, the high throughput and continuity of service that four bays of RAID 5, 6, or 10 provides, the deduplication capability, and the unparalleled data integrity provided by the ZFS file system, all in a small 1U package, then the EonNAS 1100 is an excellent candidate for you.

Pros:

+ ZFS File System = No Data Rot
+ Data Deduplication is a first at this price level
+ Comprehensive Business Feature Set
+ Single Pool file system
+ High quality construction
+ 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM is standard
+ Migration from 1 disk to RAID is FAST & easy
+ TotalRecovery Pro Backup S/W (includes 4 License)
+ Integrated 250W power supply
+ One-Touch backup capability for USB & eSATA drives
+ Robust tools to enhance data availability
+ Excellent value compared to current alternatives
+ Disk Roaming for NAS migration (1,2,3,4=4,3,1,2)

Cons:

- ZFS file system slows performance
- No USB 3.0 ports
- RAID10 has to be setup manually
- Drive trays and bays not labeled 1,2,3,4

Ratings:

• Performance: 9.25
• Appearance: 9.00
• Construction: 9.00
• Functionality: 9.50
• Value: 9.25

Final Score: 9.20 out of 10.

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

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