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I really really want to see this (with a embedded 10G NIC) in a new generation of NASes. It's embarrassing how much that space has stagnated in the prosumer spa
by InTheArena 7y ago
I really really want to see this (with a embedded 10G NIC) in a new generation of NASes. It's embarrassing how much that space has stagnated in the prosumer space, and this looks like a nice replacement for the celery or atom processors.
- MisterTea 7y agoFor NAS with 10GbE have a look at the embedded Epyc 3000. Though again, still wondering why we don't see native AMD 10GbE ports and instead see intel nics.
- the8472 7y agoMy understanding is that apart from mellanox intel has one of the best ethernet NICs when it comes to hardware offloading features, which is probably saves a large fraction of CPU cycles in embedded environments.
- 1_person 7y agoIt's not that Intel NICs have the most features, not by far. It's that the features of Intel NICs actually work.
- MisterTea 7y agoI get that Intel has and continues to make some of the best ethernet silicon but I find it kind of silly that in this day and age a company like AMD can't build decent NIC. I'd like to see someone implement the AMD 10 GbE ports and do some benchmarking.
- tpolzer 7y agoI'm building a NAS right now. The Epyc 3000 parts looked appealing, but it's ~impossible to get them in Switzerland (and hard in Germany). While getting an Atom/Xeon-D board is relatively easy and there's a lot more choice.
- Aaronstotle 7y agoThat would be great, firewalls too. I think it's crazy that a 5-8k Cisco ASA comes with a weak intel atom processor.
- mschuster91 7y agoCisco's (and for that matter most other) networking gear is ASIC/FPGA based AFAIK, the Atom or whatever main CPU is almost always only for management purposes.
- ksec 7y agoThe Celeron Processors used in NAS ( assuming you were referring to Synology and Qnap ) are still much cheaper than lowest cost Zen 2. For AMD's NAD offering ( or applicable to NAS ) it should be their Embedded Line [1] which offers 10G. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpower-ryzen-embedded-apus-starting-at-6w https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpo...
- StillBored 7y agoAnd availability isn't there for one off use, and from the looks of it a basic Pentium setup is still a lot less expensive.
- close04 7y agoHome NAS tech has mostly stagnated because of LAN speeds. Any improvement on the NAS side will not translate to real life performance gains. Almost nobody has 2.5/5/10G network cards or switches, most people probably don't even want them at today's costs (vicious cycle) and power consumption. Pretty sure if you ask 95+% of them they'd rather have faster, more stable WiFi. Manufacturers settled on exactly what can saturate a GbE line, with minimal power consumption, heat generation, noise, size, and most importantly price. There are options for 10G to fit every need but none will come cheap.
- InTheArena 7y agoThe nice thing is that Ubiquiti and others are moving to a new set of switches that seem to make 10Gig much cheaper. (Check out the new 10gGIGE UDM Pro and switches). That should change the equation... eventually.
- tecleandor 7y agoMikrotik has a bunch of very affordable 10G switches too :)
- StillBored 7y ago
- rbanffy 7y agoAren't NAS's IO-constrained? The added memory in relation to Atom's may be an advantage, but, unless you use a lot of very fast storage with real time block-level deduplication and compression, the processor will be extremely bored inside its box.
- Nursie 7y agoIt depends what you do with them. A lot of consumer/prosumer NAS boxes are effectively a little home server, with various services running on them.
- mey 7y agoThey Ryzen chips have a significant bump in PCIE bandwidth compared to Intel chips of this generation. Without knowing specifically which Atom to pull up in Intel Ark, I can't compare but I expect that anything in this lineup would smoke an Atom chip for raw IO capacity.
- tpolzer 7y agoYou'd compare them to Xeon D (which are more comparable in terms of power/intended usage), so e.g. for top of the line 16 core models, the EPYC Embedded 3451 vs. the Xeon D-2183IT, with 64 vs. 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
- rbanffy 7y agoIsn't that a lot of IO capacity for a home server? BTW, I checked Xeon D motherboards and got scared with the prices.
- devonkim 7y agoThere's 2 generations of Xeon D's - the 15xx series from circa 2015 and the 21xx series from about a year ago. Their target market is essentially for low powered but somewhat powerful compute farms. Their pricing is part of the Intel mark-up for supporting RDIMMs on top of other datacenter-centric features such as remote management BOMs, SFF-8088 connector for onboard LSI HBAs, and even SFP+ support. Those features are quite reasonable for the $600 range when including an efficient low-TDP CPU. My home server pegs my I/O when I run some tests to push a ton of bytes through Kafka, Postgres, Rook, etc. on top of a ZFS zpool. I do K8S at home along with some deep learning + big data-y toy projects because it's still cheaper than firing the equivalent up in any cloud provider after about 6 months of operation for myself, and at least I can repurpose my toys.
- windexh8er 7y agoQNAP has a bunch of their line using AMD embedded (many with 10G, but more on the "Enterprise" line). They've been using AMD for quite a while. Even though, the TS/TVS lines have many AMD options that are relatively fast in the line of prosumer space. They are, however, more expensive than what you'd spend doing an Unraid ServerBuilds.Net NasKiller type build. That being said - totally agree. There are much better base platforms that have been out for a while of which NAS providers seem to ignore. Synology seems to have gotten really good at charging a premium for underwhelming system specs. I realize some people just want redundant network storage, however given the price points one would expect the ability to run a few additional services, containers, VMs, etc on those platforms.