EonNAS Pro 850X NAS Server Review

Manufacturer: Infortrend Technology Inc.
Product Name: EonNAS Pro 850X
Model Number: ENP8502MD-0032
UPC: 886763000323
Price As Tested: $2499.00

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

All digital storage technologies: CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HDD, SSD, NAND, are susceptible to data rot. Just ask the multimedia giant Pixar, who watched dozens of critical files disappear before their eyes during the production of the movie "Toy Story". Oh, and their backup process had failed, in the background... NASA has already lost data from its moon missions, the same way. Modern hard drives are remarkably reliable devices, but most have an average uncorrectable read error rate of 10^14. Statistically, that means one read failure for every 12TB of data. The drive doesn't "crash"; it just gives you corrupted data every now and then. 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 850X is one of the largest members of their EonNAS Pro series. This eight bay model has a tower form factor, and units with similar capabilities are available in rack mount form, as well. Inside are an Intel Core i3 CPU running at 3.30 GHz, and 8GB of DDR3-1333 DRAM to push the data around. That's an unusually high amount of RAM for a NAS unit, and we'll see why it's there, later. For all of its benefits, the ZFS file system extracts a performance penalty. Two Gigabit Ethernet network ports are standard, and the expansion slot for additional Network Interface Cards (NIC) is populated with a dual 10GbE model that uses SFP+ connectors. Eight SATA 3Gb/s drive bays offer single disk, and RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60 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 Pro 850X 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, running on the NAS.

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 Thecus N5550 NAS server recently, which falls in the middle between those two extremes. Let's see how this 8-bay NAS compares to its competitors.

Closer Look: EonNAS Pro 850X 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. With eight bays available, the EonNas Pro 850X is at the high end of NAS units, especially those with a tower format. 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 those 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 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 eight SATA drives installed, you have an abundance of RAID options with the 850X:

• RAID 0 (Disk Striping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring),
• RAID 5 (Block-level striping with distributed parity),
• RAID 5 + Hot Spare,
• RAID 6 (Block-level striping with redundant distributed parity),
• RAID 6 + Hot Spare,
• RAID 10 (Striped (RAID 0) array whose segments are mirrored),
• RAID 50 (Striped (RAID 0) array which is striped across a RAID 5 array),
• RAID 60 (Striped (RAID 0) array which is striped across a RAID 6 array)

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. With eight bays, many users are going to opt for the higher level configurations, either for higher performance or higher fault tolerance.

The EonNAS Pro 850X is a relatively large unit, arranged in a tower format instead of a rack mount configuration. Infortrend does make similar units in both styles, so you have the option of choosing the format that works best for your space. The size and weight are significant, but no bigger or heavier than other common equipment in a data center: 310mm (H) x 175mm (W) x 380mm (D), and 8.9 kg (19.6 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. Infortrend estimates that a unit with HDDs installed will weigh 14.3 kg (31.6 lb.). There are no handles on the unit, which is going to make it a handful to move around, if it's necessary.

All of the front panel controls and drive bays are accessible from the front of the unit, and the access door only covers the drive bays. In a device as large as this, there's plenty of room for a display on the front, plus push buttons, indicator lights, and USB ports. The eight drive bays span almost the entire remainder of the front panel. On the right side of the front panel is the Power button. To the left of that are four status LEDS for System Status, Ethernet 1&2 links, and HDD Status. The system status LED only lights up red when there is a system failure, otherwise it's off. The Ethernet indicators glow steady green during idle conditions, and blink when data is being transmitted through the ports. The HDD status LED blinks amber when there is activity on any of the drives. The two-line LCD display is on the left side of the panel, and the two navigation buttons (Enter & Select) are right next to it. Hidden behind the panel is a System Error Buzzer, which indicates one of 15 possible conditions with long and short beeps. The far right side of the front panel has an external USB 2.0 jack located almost at the bottom edge of the unit. Although not limited to this function, it's designated as the Quick Backup USB Port. The backup operation can work either way, backing up from the USB device to the NAS, or from the NAS to the USB device. Operation of this port is configured in the system software, under the One Touch Copy menu.

The drive bays are formed from cutouts in the sheet metal chassis. There are no cross braces in the front, just a wide open rectangular hole that ends in a backplane. The drive bays are marked 1...8 on the front bezel, but the individual drive trays are not marked. The drive trays are mostly plastic, but the front surface has a metal panel that acts as an RFI shield. Each of the trays has a strip of metal fingers that make electrical contact with the tray above, so there is unbroken conductivity from the bottom of the chassis to the top. The bronze strip, seen in the image below on the bottom of the chassis opening, connects the bottom tray to the chassis and the equivalent happens at the very top. There are ventilation holes in the drive trays and along the front edge of the left-hand side panel of the EonNAS Pro 850X chassis. The cooling air enters at the front of the unit and is exhausted out the rear by two dedicated 80mm fans controlled by the NAS. There is a similar size fan integrated into the power supply, which exhausts out the back and is controlled internally by the PSU. 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.....

Around the back of the EonNAS Pro 850X, you can see all of the hardwired I/O points. Starting at the top is the expansion card slot with the two additional 10GbE SFP+ ports pointed at you. Travelling down the left hand side are the three 80mm cooling fans we mentioned earlier. Between the top two fans is a hole for a Kensington lock; you don't want this piece of hardware walking away, it's probably got lots of data that you need, and a whole lot of data that you don't want other people to have. Down the right hand side are all the regular I/O connections. There are two GbE ports with RJ-45 connectors, nestled to the right are four USB 2.0 connections. Below them are a 9-pin Serial port and a HD15-pin VGA connector, both reserved for factory setup and maintenance. Next up in the trip down are an eSATA port and the Restore Default Settings button, which is recessed behind a small hole in the rear panel. Two more USB 2.0 ports are added below that, for good measure, and finally the IEC male power connector and an On/OFF switch complete the picture.

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. Thankfully, the same was true of the EonNAS 850X, it produced less noise than I was expecting for such a big unit. Even though it's larger, and targeted at business users, the EonNAS Pro 850X has an advantage over the rack mount devices I've tested. None of them were as quiet as the NAS units intended for domestic use, because the form factor only allows very small (40mm) fans to be used. 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 larger fans on the EonNAS 850X were definitely quieter than the other 8-bay NAS I tested, just because of basic physics.

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 Pro 850X NAS Server

The insides of these things are always more interesting than the outsides, at least to me. The EonNAS Pro 850X came apart very quickly, with just four screws needing to be removed in order to release the u-shaped panel that makes up the sides and top surface of the enclosure. The outer panel was tightly fitted, mostly due to the various EMI/RFI grounding strips that provide an electrical path between the inner chassis and the outer shell. The main controller board takes up a portion of the left hand side of the chassis, and most of the functions are integrated on the single board, including many of the back panel connectors. Fitting all the required components into a tower format requires a bit of 3-Dimensional thinking. The last EonNAS unit I reviewed was a thin, 1U rack mount system, and everything was all in one horizontal plane. A large tower like this, with eight drive bays, also means it's impractical to integrate everything on one or two PCBs. It's no more complicated than a PC, but you all know how challenging cable management can be in a mini tower case.

The backplane PCB for all the SATA drive connections is tightly secured to a metal backing plate with stiffening ribs on all four sides. The backplane is almost entirely passive, meaning that there are no logic devices on the board, just some power supply components, a few resistors and all the wiring required to fan out SATA power and signals to eight drives. The 16 LEDs for signaling Drive Ready (Green) and Drive Activity (Blue) on each of the eight drives are located on this PCB, and thin acrylic light pipes carry the photons all the way to the front of the drive tray, where they are visible to the user.

Each Drive tray holds one individual drive in the EonNAS Pro 850X, and the tray is a common part across the product line. Inserting and removing the drive trays was smooth, more so with HDDs mounted in the tray. There are individual locking devices on each of the latches, and no keys are required to operate them. The latches acted like a locking device and a lever; once the trays reached the end of their travel, swinging the latch down pushes the tray firmly into place. 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 marked 1...8 on the front bezel, but the individual drive trays are not marked. 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. There is an exception to this, and Infortrend calls it "Disk Roaming". If you want to physically migrate your data from one NAS system to another, you don't have to retain the order of the drives in the new chassis.

The main controller board is basically a mini-ITX PC design, which means it's densely populated and only has one PCI Express slot. A prominent fan-cooled heatsink covers the CPU and an 80mm fan blows air down through it, towards the motherboard. The Core i3-2125 CPU is not a low power device, like the many Atom and ARM-based CPUs that are used in a large number of less-capable NAS units. It's a full-fledged member of the Sandy Bridge family and needs power and cooling just like the CPU in a typical PC. With a max TDP of 65W, it won't heat the house on cold winter nights, but active cooling is a necessity. The Platform Controller Hub is cooled with a simple passive heatsink, as it is in most applications. The only SATA connection that comes into the PCH is the eSATA port on the rear panel. All the other SATA ports on the motherboard are empty.

The power supply unit is a standard model from Delta Electronics and is rated for 430 watts of output. The main outputs are 3.3V, two 5V rails, and +/- 12V. There are a number of unused output cables that are bundled up and stored off to the side inside the chassis. 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 100V - 230V AC power feeds commonly encountered in various parts of the world. There is dedicated power switch sitting below the IEC receptacle, on the rear panel.

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 Pro 850X NAS Server

The EonNAS Pro 850X uses one of the Intel Sandy Bridge Core i3 Dual-Core CPUs, based on 32nm fabrication technology, the i3-2120. Introduced in Q1 of 2011, the i3-2120 runs at a speedy clock frequency of 3.30 GHz. Some models may use the i3-2125 version, which is equivalent as far as the CPU internals, but the 2125 features HD-3000 graphics instead of HD-2000. It's also scheduled for discontinuance in 3Q2013, while the 2120 has no published EOL at this time. The integrated graphics controller runs at a relatively fast clock speed of 850 MHz, which also isn't really important for this NAS, since it doesn't normally output video. Lastly, the 3MB Intel Smart Cache and the integrated memory controller that supports DDR3-1066/1333 DRAM are both performance enhancing features, and a big upgrade from the 1MB cache and DDR3-800 capabilities of the Atom CPUs frequently found in smaller NAS units. The CPU package fits in the normal LGA1155 socket, and the TDP is a modest 65W. The CPU does not support the AES NI extensions for encryption, so don't expect to be able to encrypt your disks without a major performance penalty. In the foreground of the image below is the single x16 PCI Express 2.0 expansion slot, which is used to provide a high bandwidth connection between the drive controller and the CPU. (The drive controller that normally resides there was removed for this image.) Note, this PCIe connection goes directly to the Core i3 CPU; it does not go through the Platform Controller Hub.

The motherboard is a pretty standard small-form-factor design, and in an eight-bay NAS like this, standard designs don't cut it, if used alone. Infortrend uses the single PCI 2.0 slot to radically expand the capabilities of the basic Intel architecture in order to handle the demands of managing eight disks in high-order RAID, plus the two 10GbE network interfaces. The custom PCB below has two internal SFF-8087 Mini-SAS connectors that are cabled up to the eight-position SATA backplane (see the two red braided cables, above). These connectors are most often seen on RAID controllers, with fan-out cables attached. Here, the copper traces on the backplane do the fanning out to the eight SATA II ports; the cables are SFF-8087 on both ends. The four small ICs surrounding the SFF-8087 ports are JMB362, 1-lane PCI Express to 2-port Serial ATA II Host Controllers from JMicron. They interface directly with the eight SATA drives connected to the backplane. The heatsink on the left is covering up a PCI Express switching IC that takes the eight PCIe lanes wired up to the card edge and parcels them out where and when they're needed. Just above the card edge is a small connector which takes some of those PCIe lanes off to a small daughterboard that provides the two 10GbE network interfaces. As I said above, this expansion card is a very custom design, which allows Infortrend to use a common spec Intel Core-i3 motherboard in a very specialized application that would normally choke a standard design.

Instead of using the Intel Platform Hub Controller to provide the SATA interfaces, the EonNAS 850X uses eight lanes of the x16 PCI Express interface that comes right out of the CPU. In a typical desktop system you might use that for a video card, but Intel doesn't restrict the use of the interface; the data sheet calls out Graphics or I/O as potential uses for the data stream. In this case, its disk I/O that's coming across the wire and its eight independent data streams. What do you do when you have multiple data feeds that you need to consolidate - you put in a switch, right? Most people only think of Ethernet when switches are mentioned in the same breath as computers, but all kinds of data needs switching, not just network traffic. The biggest chip on the expansion board, and the one doing the most work, is the IDT 89H24. According to its maker, the "89H24NT6AG2 is a 24-lane, 6-port system interconnect switch optimized for PCI Express Gen2 packet switching in high-performance applications, supporting multiple simultaneous peer-to-peer traffic flows." Sounds like a smart way to manage the data from eight disks running in higher order RAID, if you ask me. In a clear division of labor, the high-level RAID functions are handled by the CPU, while the frenetic transfer of data from multiple sources is handled by a switch. I keep coming back to the fact that at some point, once you have more than 4 or 5 drives in a complex array, you can't use the standard PC-based architecture anymore. Smaller NAS models do well to take advantage of the "free" SATA interfaces that come along with the standard Intel package of CPU and Southbridge, or PCH; the big dogs need to think outside that box.

The four drive controllers are sourced from JMicron, and they each support dual connections of the SATA 3Gb/s specification, also known as SATA II, for interfacing with the drives. The other side of the function block is PCI Express, Base Spec. Revision 1.0a. Since each lane of PCI Express is capable of transferring 2.5Gbps, there's plenty of bandwidth supporting each chip to service two HDDs. If SSDs were installed in the drive bays, they would each be capable of saturating this interface, as they can each move a maximum of 3.0 Gbps of data through each of the SATA II connection, but only when new. Even Enterprise-class SSDs can't meet those kinds of specs as NAND wear takes its inevitable toll. Most NAS devices are still optimized for HDDs, not SSDs. Even at the Enterprise level, where Storage Area Networks (SAN) are a common choice for storage, the current trend is for hybrid devices, with a mix of HDD and SSD.

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 is the dog's life for a flash memory chip (SSD Boot Drive, anyone...?); this module never breaks a sweat.

The two Gigabit Ethernet controllers are supplied by Intel and they use a tag-team approach to provide both Media Access Control (MAC) and the Physical Layer (PHY) for the RJ-45 ports. The WGG82574L and the WG82579LM combine forces to provide the MAC and PHY functions. The latter chip was just launched in 1Q2011, so Intel is keeping things current in this area. Each chip connects to the rest of the system by an x1 PCIe Rev. 1.1 interface, and there is a 40kB buffer on-board to smooth out data transfers, by buffering complete packets before transmitting them. Intel is one of the premier suppliers of NICs to the enterprise market, even though they're not very well known for it by the general public, so it's not a big surprise that NAS vendors choose their products for implementing integrated GbE interfaces. The EonNAS 850X also has two 10GbE interfaces, which are just what's needed to support a large, high performance NAS like this. I'll cover them, and their performance enhancing capabilities, in a follow-up article.

Last, but not least is the 8 GB of DDR3 memory that is standard on the EonNAS Pro 850X. It's carried on two 4GB DIMMs, and the modules supplied by Apacer are rated for DDR3-1333 with timings of 9-9-9 for CL-tRCD-tRP. The SDRAM chips themselves are sourced from Elpida. This is the maximum memory speed supported by the Intel Core i3 CPU, so no expense was spared with the supplied DRAM. Given the impact on overall performance that RAM has for the Solaris-based O/S and the ZFS file system that comes along with it, I'd say Infortrend was wise to max out this particular subsystem.

To measure isolated NAS power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. Obviously, power consumption is going to depend heavily on the number and type of drives that are installed. Once the system completes its boot process, and gets into normal operating mode, it settled in at about 54 watts of power consumption with one drive installed. With all four drives installed, it idled at 75W. During Write operations, it drew 95W, and Read operations drew 85W. When the ½ hour default sleep timer kicked in and the drives were powered down, the power consumption went down to 51W. When the unit is turned off, it still consumes 2W in Vampire mode; be aware that even when it's turned off, the integral 430W SMPS still pulls a small amount of power.

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 Pro 850X. 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 850X 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 850X, 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 Pro 850X 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 Pro 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 850X series ships with eight (8) 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 Pro 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 Pro 850X, let's look at the Hardware and Software specifications that provide the power and performance to make those features run.

EonNAS 850X Hardware Specifications

Hardware Specifications

EonNAS 850X Software Specifications

The EonNAS Pro Series is designed for small businesses - period. However, I also contend that the modern 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 850X 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 850X 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 Information 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 testing of this NAS. IPv4 and IPv6 are both accommodated and the two integral ports are labeled LAN1 and LAN2. Ports LAN3 and LAN4 are the two 10GbE ports coming off the additional NIC on the EonNAS Pro 850X. I'll be testing those and reporting on them in a follow-up article.

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 Pro 850X 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. RAID 10, 50, and 60 are missing from this setup screen. You have to build these configurations manually, starting with a single RAID set, and then add another RAID 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 tested 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 Pro 850X was v1.4.102 when I received it, which is the most current version.

I connected the NAS directly to an Intel Gigabit CT Desktop LAN controller in the test-bench system, with ten-foot CAT6 patch cables. I set all the components up with static IP addresses in the 192.168.xxx.yyy range. I'm looking forward to installing a 10GBase-T switch in the near future, and then we'll get a better understanding of the maximum throughput the EonNAS 850X platform can deliver. The testing I've done with both switched networks and direct NAS connections with 1000Base-T has shown no appreciable differences in transfer speeds, so I feel comfortable using either network arrangement for 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 8192. 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
• EonNAS 1100 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, there are three leaders at the top of the chart, the EonNAS 850X, the QNAP TS-879U-RP, and the Thecus N5550. The differences are mostly down to CPU performance in this test, although some of the other infrastructure ICs do have an impact. The EonNAS Pro 850X is doing very well in this test, considering the ZFS file system extracts a performance penalty for the extra features it provides. The extra memory helps counteract that, and allows the 850X to hang in there at the top of the heap with its Linux cousins. With a top transfer rate of 99.8 MB/s, it's also well above the rest of the pack, which is running with less powerful CPUs. Most devices performed better on the 1GB Read test with Jumbo Frames enabled, but the EonNAS 850X and the QNAP TS-879U-RP did not. Most people who buy an 8-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 Pro 850X architecture doesn't claim the top spot in Read performance, but let's look at Write performance now.

Moving on to the 1 GB write bandwidth test, the EonNAS Pro 850X makes a leap in performance, with an average Write speed of 114.3 MB/s putting it in a three-way tie for first place with the TS-879U-RP and the N5550. The Write test also evened out the Jumbo Frame performance differences on the 850X, by achieving almost identical results with MTU values of 1500 and 8192. Some of the other units had trouble in this test with the standard MTU setting, and it probably hurt the ReadyNAS NV+ v2 performance, too. For the most part, the Write results are in three groupings, with units based on the: Intel i3, Intel Atom, and Marvell CPUs.

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 850X didn't pick up any performance gains when reading the larger file, nor did the QNAP TS-879U-RP, but the Thecus N5550 gained a few points. Clearly none of these units were bothered by handling very large files, but some also got an unexpected 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 both front-line and back-line storage 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 Pro 850X hits a slightly higher performance level, at 114.4/115.4 MB/s, with 1500 and 9000 MTU values. Like the results with 1GB files, the top three NAS devices are in a virtual 3-way tie here. The Intel Atom and Marvell-based units all fall way back on this test.

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
• EonNAS 1100 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 EonNAS 850X and the QNAP TS-879U-RP have eight drive bays, 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. We'll do a follow-up later, to measure 10GbE network performance, and then we'll load up all the available bays.

The results for RAID 5 Read testing show the EonNAS Pro 850X still slotted slightly below the high end QNAP and the Thecus N5550. 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. Lesser products typically have problems handling the extra processing required to manage all the parity and data striping machinations that go on with higher-value RAID configurations. None of the NAS products in this test suffer any real performance hits when they have to handle four drives simultaneously, instead of just one.

The 1 GB RAID 5 disk Read and Write tests show more clearly the kind of performance that a typical user would experience with these high-end NAS products. The EonNAS Pro 850X once more shows off its strong write performance, sitting right alongside the top-performing models from QNAP and Thecus. This is great news for anyone who is interested in deploying a NAS with the ZFS file system. This proves that with a reasonable amount of CPU power and a significant upgrade in the memory size, results can be obtained that are on par with Linux-based systems. RAID 5 Write performance can be a weak point in some systems, 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 NAS units lag far behind both the Intel Atom and Core i3 units. 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 850X 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. It's instructive to compare the performance of the two EonNAS models, since they are the only two in this test using the ZFS file system. It's clear that the higher processing power of the i3-2120 CPU and the 8GB or RAM make a big difference in performance. I watched the CPU usage chart during the trials, and without deduplication and encryption enabled, the CPU never moved above the 25% load mark on Read tests, so there's plenty of reserve available. 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 Pro 850X also has basically the same average write speed with 10GB files, all within 1 GB/s. All three of the top performers just grin at the additional load of four hard drives; the CPU utilization never stayed above 25% during this Write test. The Intel Atom devices have to work a lot harder; the CPU was often maxed out 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 Pro 850X is better at writing large files to disk, than it is reading them. It's also clear that Infortrend have tackled the ZFS performance penalty head on, and eliminated it as a potential problem for users. While additional memory was rather pointless in most of the Linux-based NAS units we've tested, the Solaris-based models experience real performance gains from bumping up the DRAM count.

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
• EonNAS 1100 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 90-100 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, let's look at the benchmarks 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 Pro 850X shows some minor weakness on this test, just like it did with the Read tests for basic file transfers. 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 single file transfer tests we just ran. As the playback speed increases, the EonNAS gets closer to the performance of the other NAS units. At 2x playback speed, it reaches 74% of the highest result; at 4x playback speed, it gets up to 90% of the highest speed of the competition. These results are much better than the EonNAS 1100 achieved in these three tests, validating that the increased hardware performance can be used to offset the performance difference in the operating systems.

In the Medium-Speed tests, the EonNAS Pro 850X does much better in the tests that involve Writes to the NAS - HD Playback & Record, and Office Productivity. The 850X gets either first or second place in these two benchmarks. 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 two of the NASPT tests that are predominately Write-based give unrealistic results, because that's where the EonNAS products really shine.

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 powerful and consistent performance on the two Directory Copy tests, crushing the more expensive QNAP TS-879U-RP in both cases. This Directory benchmark 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 benchmark 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 file Read performance of the EonNAS Pro 850X holds it back just a little, while the Directory Copy performance gives it a boost. It would have been nice if NASPT had a companion Benchmark that was Write-based, in order to see the balance between the two.

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
• EonNAS 1100 Gigabit 4-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 Pro 850X 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 Pro 850X turned in an excellent performance on ATTO, reaching a peak Read speed of 117.5 MB/s and a peak Write speed of 118.5 MB/s. These results are at the very top tier of NAS performance, and are bumping hard against the 125MB/s theoretical max transfer rate of Gigabit Ethernet. 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 the 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 the maximum performance level was already reached by the 32 kB block size test. 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 Pro 850X 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 class-leading 73.9 MB/s on sequential Read and a competitive result of 97.4 MB/s average on sequential Write tests. The 4k tests show 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 huge 114.4 MB/s on Read, while Write is still down in the single digits at 6.8 MB/s.

All in all, these are a respectable set of results for Network Attached Storage. Sure, they may be lower than a true local drive connection, with a high performance HDD connected directly into the SATA controller on the motherboard. But, for a NAS device mimicking a local HDD, the EonNAS Pro 850X performs quite well. None of the NAS devices we've tested are substantially faster, and 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 Pro Series 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 Pro 850X 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 a while, but the writing is on the wall. The cost to upgrade switches and routers to 10 GbE is still higher than regular GbE, but it soon won't be cost prohibitive for users who don't have a dedicated LAN room. There are some new low-cost 10GBASE-T switches on the horizon. Stay tuned to Benchmark Reviews for a first look at the latest technology to trickle down from the data centers. This 8-bay NAS is sized for a medium-sized business or the small business that is data-centric, with its high capacity, higher transfer speeds, and 10GbE connectivity options. If you're making that kind of investment in IT infrastructure, I hope this article highlighted the business-centric features of the whole EonNAS series.

So, what conclusions can we draw about this high performance, eight-bay EonNAS Pro 850X NAS server? Click NEXT to find out, and discuss...

EonNAS Pro 850X 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 Pro 850X 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 Pro 850X 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. During timed transfers of 1GB and 10GB files the EonNAS Pro 850X recorded Read speeds above 99 MB/s and Write speeds of 116 MB/s. The Intel Core i3-2120 processor and the 8GB of SDRAM were far from being maxed out during these tests, leaving quite a bit of overhead left for deduplication or data encryption. 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, and the dual 10GbE interfaces offer increased performance for larger loads, either now or later.

The tower form factor of the eight bay EonNAS Pro 850X means lots of space on the front panel, and in normal use the front panel is the most visible part of the unit. The eight drive trays span almost the entire height, are hidden behind a hinged door, and they both have vents on the front for bringing fresh air into the drive bays. The status LEDs for each HDD are mounted on the right hand edge of each drive tray, and are visible through the ventilation holes on the front door. The On/OFF button is fairly large, with a status light, and the status LEDs just left of it are easy to see and well-marked. The two-line LCD display has a light blue backlight, which shuts off some time after the last message is displayed. It's one of the nicer styled NAS towers I've seen, with very clean lines executed in basic black. The side and top panels are powder coated steel, and have no distinctive markings, besides some small ventilation holes on the left side.

The construction quality of the EonNAS Pro 850X consistent with its all-business mission statement. The inner framework has more in common with smaller NAS models built on the tower format - punched and pressed sheet metal, but it's still a sturdy design. The unit came apart fairly easily when needed, by removing four screws and then the top cover. All the components were securely mounted, and good cable management was in evidence throughout. The assembly techniques all showed evidence of good industrial practice, and most parts were well finished, without any sharp edges. The sheet metal chassis had a lot of sharp edges unfortunately, but I managed to avoid any cuts on my fingers while I was working on it. 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 Pro 850X 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 models are the only ones to run Solaris 11, a derivative of the original SunOS that pioneered ZFS. So, while the functionality and features of the EonNAS Pro 850X are strictly limited to its intended business role, they are extremely advanced and Infortrend is pioneering the use of high-end data integrity tools in the low end of the marketplace.

As of December 2012 the EonNAS Pro 850X model has a street price of $2499.00 for a diskless model. It's not available from Newegg yet, but it is available from several storage integrators like Eaegis, SimplyNAS, and Provantage. Given the unique data integrity features it has, the number of drive bays, the included 10GbE interface, and the performance it offers, I think that's a very attractive price for a small or medium-sized business that needs to keep its data safe. The IT staff 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 may go for one of the bigger units in the EonNAS series with 12 bays, but the 850X can hold somewhere between 20 and 30TB of data when filled with modern SATA drives.

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, or consumer-focused applications, then you need to look elsewhere to meet those needs. But, if you need the storage capacity, the high throughput and continuity of service that eight bays of RAID 5, 6, 10, 50, or 60 provides, with 10GbE-class performance, and the unparalleled data integrity provided by the ZFS file system, then the EonNAS Pro 850X is an excellent candidate for you.

Pros:

+ ZFS File System = No Data Rot
+ Data Deduplication is a first at this price level
+ Performance matches Linux-based systems
+ Comprehensive Business Feature Set
+ Single Pool file system
+ Class-leading WRITE performance
+ 8 GB DDR3-1333 SDRAM is standard
+ Migration from 1 disk to RAID is Fast & Easy
+ TotalRecovery Pro Backup S/W (includes 8 License)
+ Integrated 430W 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
- RAID10/50/60 has to be setup manually
- Single power supply, no redundancy
- Drive trays not labeled 1,...8

Ratings:

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

Final Score: 9.30 out of 10.

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

COMMENT QUESTION: What type of environment (work/home/enterprise) do you use a NAS server?

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