3 ms·

I just wish they would put better processors in their stuff. Is this yet another NAS powered by an ARM Cortex?

by qurren 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
hannesfur 4mo ago
It says 8 Arm Neoverse N2 cores in the blog post. So not directly ARM Cortex, derived from ARM Cortex-X3 but same family as NVIDIA Grace, Google Axion and AWS Graviton4.
softfalcon 4mo ago
I have heard others say the same as you about Ubiquiti devices. I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit. I've only been using Ubiquiti as a pro-sumer, but it has held up well for my use case of Plex and little game servers. I use a Synology NAS for my storage though, which is a slightly beefier mobile AMD chipset. I'd be very interested to know what I should and shouldn't expect from my ARM based network stack though!
- qurren 4mo ago
  > I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit. 1. My UDM Pro absolutely chokes and stalls with intrusion detection enabled on the firewall and 8 cameras connected. Network goes down, cameras disconnect, devices disconnect from Wi-Fi every time a car drives past a camera due to AI features triggering, etc. For something meant for small businesses I wish they would just shove an Intel i5 or something in it. They make great switches, great APs, great everything else, just too stingy on processors on the few pieces of central equipment that people would actually be willing to spend more on. And for a $3999 enterprise NAS with dual 25 Gbps SFP ports and 16 drives? It could surely use something more beefy than a Neoverse N2. I'd say an i7 or even i9 is warranted here. 3. The UNAS 8 I don't own but I believe it would struggle with >1Gbps links and encryption enabled
  - jabart 4mo ago
    Unifi docs say that the AI feature run directly on the camera or via optional devices like the AI Port or AI Key. Odd that it impacts your UDM Pro and wifi.
    - qurren 4mo ago
      I'm sure even if the camera runs the neural net, the detection itself triggers clips to be stored, re-encoded, indexed, etc. and the UDM Pro's processor is underpowered even for this. It's even underpowered for streaming -- I found Protect to be extremely laggy, taking often 30+ seconds to open the camera stream when 3-4 stream receivers were connected.
    - jaffa2 4mo ago
      Yeah . Sounds like horseshit to me to be frank. I have a udm se, 10 g3 cams, 4k bullet+ai, door entry + cam +ai, couple of the display viewports running all day and a nano hd access point and symmetric gig with intrusion etc turned on. I also have wireguard users connecting in remotely. No problems with performance whatsoever at this point. Ok its not enterprisy its just a small business with 20 people but seems fine to me. I run synology servers.
      - 9x39 4mo ago
        He did say intrusion detection so that's probably it. That, and if you're using any kind of complicated firewall rules, those aren't HW accelerated like enterprise gear, so throughput tanks. This is worse with the older devices. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4yKf044meY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4yKf044meY https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Gateway-Intrusion-Detection-Drops-Speed-to-100mb/f42fbfb2-d880-491c-8489-bf850c78b12a https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Gateway-Intrusion-D...
        jaffa2 4mo ago
        Yeah the older devices were notoriously bad when intrusion was on. I also have it on on my unit . I do agree though nonharm in giving a bit more power. Why skimp on the cpu.
- amluto 4mo ago
  The Cloud Key Gen 2 is underpowered depending what you do with it, and it runs hot. UniFi seriously needs to refresh it. (At least it’s better than the Gen 1. The Gen 1 was disastrously bad.) The ENAS looks like fairly nice hardware. It even has ECC RAM. Not cheap, though.
  - arthurfm 4mo ago
    Considering how long it has been I don't think we will ever see a Cloud Key Gen 3/3+. Ubiquiti's Cloud Gateway Max or Fiber seems to be the modern replacement since they do the job of the Cloud Key while also serving as your router and firewall.
  - wolrah 4mo ago
    I'd be surprised if Cloud Key gets another revision, it's a dead product line as I see it. The main purpose was to provide an appliance alternative to running the controller on your own server, which is now unnecessary for most users because the routers and NVRs can all host their own controllers. The remaining market for such a product is people who are running UniFi switches and/or APs but not the router and yet still want an appliance, which is not a large space. Most of that market either has a random server they can run it on or is willing to throw together a Raspberry Pi controller.
- 9x39 4mo ago
  Basic routing and switching - expect line speed. Don't expect analysis features to run at line speed - 30-50% penalty could be normal depending on throughput. Stay away from IPS and complicated firewall rules which usually are done in CPU, and you should be fine. HW acceleration for those (esp. TLS decryption) is a major reason fancy firewalls are very expensive. You're better off building an IDS or picking up a smaller FortiGate or Palo Alto firewall if you really want to get serious there.
- zamadatix 4mo ago
  I echo what the others say in that it's much more important to know what portions of your traffic are going to need to be processed by the CPU than it is to know how beefy the CPU is. E.g., just to give an example of the usual investigation process: - The EdgeRouter 12P is ancient and had a weak CPU for even the time - However, the EdgeRouter 12P has a good selection of hardware offloads for things like routing/NAT & even a hardware switch chip. These functions will often run at (or very near) line rate without touching the CPU much, and the latency/jitter/buffer handling will often be better than when even fast CPUs handle the traffic on other products. - Buuuut there are oddball restrictions. E.g. on the newer 2.x or 3.x software streams (i.e. for the last ~5 years) hardware offload for VLAN tagged traffic on the switch does not work, and the CPU cannot switch a full 1G of traffic without choking (it gets close, but not quite). Also the hardware switch only covers a certain range of ports, some ports can only be routed or software bridged. - Even then, if you add a bunch of advanced firewall inspection rules it's gonna run out of CPU. Quicker if it didn't have offloads for some of the work, but still easy to make it go from a solid full gigabit WAN NAT box to 100-200 mbps depending on what you enable. This can repeat for a lot of features, like VPN and so on. As far as host networking (i.e. a server sending data out of its NIC rather than trying to be a network switch/router/firewall between segments) usually the CPU will be a limitation for other things before it's the limitation for sending things out the NIC. And a quality NIC (which these particular ones seem to be) can make that even more true in a similar, but less extreme, way as the switching/routing hardware offloads on the EdgeRouter. E.g. ZFS can be CPU heavy with all of the parity/encryption/deduplication features you can enable and trying to do that on top of using SFTP to transfer the data to a remote host in a single encrypted stream can stress the CPU even more... but this CPU also doesn't look like a typical bargain basement ARM CPU you'd find in cheaper Ubiquiti products and would probably do fine for what it has.
sussexby 4mo ago
It's based on Neoverse N2 which in our other platforms (e.g., ENVR Core, UDM Beast, EF Core) has contributed to vast improvements in performance versus ARM Cortex.
ikiris 4mo ago
This is how they make their money. They put out underpowered crap and constantly churn them so you have to pay them regularly. If something isn't profitable to maintain it just goes EoL.

I just wish they would put better processors in their stuff. Is this yet another NAS powered by an ARM Cortex?

by qurren 4mo ago

I just wish they would put better processors in their stuff. Is this yet another NAS powered by an ARM Cortex?

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

hannesfur 4mo ago

It says 8 Arm Neoverse N2 cores in the blog post. So not directly ARM Cortex, derived from ARM Cortex-X3 but same family as NVIDIA Grace, Google Axion and AWS Graviton4.

softfalcon 4mo ago

I have heard others say the same as you about Ubiquiti devices. I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit. I've only been using Ubiquiti as a pro-sumer, but it has held up well for my use case of Plex and little game servers. I use a Synology NAS for my storage though, which is a slightly beefier mobile AMD chipset. I'd be very interested to know what I should and shouldn't expect from my ARM based network stack though!

qurren 4mo ago
> I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit. 1. My UDM Pro absolutely chokes and stalls with intrusion detection enabled on the firewall and 8 cameras connected. Network goes down, cameras disconnect, devices disconnect from Wi-Fi every time a car drives past a camera due to AI features triggering, etc. For something meant for small businesses I wish they would just shove an Intel i5 or something in it. They make great switches, great APs, great everything else, just too stingy on processors on the few pieces of central equipment that people would actually be willing to spend more on. And for a $3999 enterprise NAS with dual 25 Gbps SFP ports and 16 drives? It could surely use something more beefy than a Neoverse N2. I'd say an i7 or even i9 is warranted here. 3. The UNAS 8 I don't own but I believe it would struggle with >1Gbps links and encryption enabled
- jabart 4mo ago
  Unifi docs say that the AI feature run directly on the camera or via optional devices like the AI Port or AI Key. Odd that it impacts your UDM Pro and wifi.
  - qurren 4mo ago
    I'm sure even if the camera runs the neural net, the detection itself triggers clips to be stored, re-encoded, indexed, etc. and the UDM Pro's processor is underpowered even for this. It's even underpowered for streaming -- I found Protect to be extremely laggy, taking often 30+ seconds to open the camera stream when 3-4 stream receivers were connected.
  - jaffa2 4mo ago
    Yeah . Sounds like horseshit to me to be frank. I have a udm se, 10 g3 cams, 4k bullet+ai, door entry + cam +ai, couple of the display viewports running all day and a nano hd access point and symmetric gig with intrusion etc turned on. I also have wireguard users connecting in remotely. No problems with performance whatsoever at this point. Ok its not enterprisy its just a small business with 20 people but seems fine to me. I run synology servers.
    - 9x39 4mo ago
      He did say intrusion detection so that's probably it. That, and if you're using any kind of complicated firewall rules, those aren't HW accelerated like enterprise gear, so throughput tanks. This is worse with the older devices. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4yKf044meY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4yKf044meY https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Gateway-Intrusion-Detection-Drops-Speed-to-100mb/f42fbfb2-d880-491c-8489-bf850c78b12a https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Gateway-Intrusion-D...
      - jaffa2 4mo ago
        Yeah the older devices were notoriously bad when intrusion was on. I also have it on on my unit . I do agree though nonharm in giving a bit more power. Why skimp on the cpu.
amluto 4mo ago
The Cloud Key Gen 2 is underpowered depending what you do with it, and it runs hot. UniFi seriously needs to refresh it. (At least it’s better than the Gen 1. The Gen 1 was disastrously bad.) The ENAS looks like fairly nice hardware. It even has ECC RAM. Not cheap, though.
- arthurfm 4mo ago
  Considering how long it has been I don't think we will ever see a Cloud Key Gen 3/3+. Ubiquiti's Cloud Gateway Max or Fiber seems to be the modern replacement since they do the job of the Cloud Key while also serving as your router and firewall.
- wolrah 4mo ago
  I'd be surprised if Cloud Key gets another revision, it's a dead product line as I see it. The main purpose was to provide an appliance alternative to running the controller on your own server, which is now unnecessary for most users because the routers and NVRs can all host their own controllers. The remaining market for such a product is people who are running UniFi switches and/or APs but not the router and yet still want an appliance, which is not a large space. Most of that market either has a random server they can run it on or is willing to throw together a Raspberry Pi controller.
9x39 4mo ago
Basic routing and switching - expect line speed. Don't expect analysis features to run at line speed - 30-50% penalty could be normal depending on throughput. Stay away from IPS and complicated firewall rules which usually are done in CPU, and you should be fine. HW acceleration for those (esp. TLS decryption) is a major reason fancy firewalls are very expensive. You're better off building an IDS or picking up a smaller FortiGate or Palo Alto firewall if you really want to get serious there.
zamadatix 4mo ago
I echo what the others say in that it's much more important to know what portions of your traffic are going to need to be processed by the CPU than it is to know how beefy the CPU is. E.g., just to give an example of the usual investigation process: - The EdgeRouter 12P is ancient and had a weak CPU for even the time - However, the EdgeRouter 12P has a good selection of hardware offloads for things like routing/NAT & even a hardware switch chip. These functions will often run at (or very near) line rate without touching the CPU much, and the latency/jitter/buffer handling will often be better than when even fast CPUs handle the traffic on other products. - Buuuut there are oddball restrictions. E.g. on the newer 2.x or 3.x software streams (i.e. for the last ~5 years) hardware offload for VLAN tagged traffic on the switch does not work, and the CPU cannot switch a full 1G of traffic without choking (it gets close, but not quite). Also the hardware switch only covers a certain range of ports, some ports can only be routed or software bridged. - Even then, if you add a bunch of advanced firewall inspection rules it's gonna run out of CPU. Quicker if it didn't have offloads for some of the work, but still easy to make it go from a solid full gigabit WAN NAT box to 100-200 mbps depending on what you enable. This can repeat for a lot of features, like VPN and so on. As far as host networking (i.e. a server sending data out of its NIC rather than trying to be a network switch/router/firewall between segments) usually the CPU will be a limitation for other things before it's the limitation for sending things out the NIC. And a quality NIC (which these particular ones seem to be) can make that even more true in a similar, but less extreme, way as the switching/routing hardware offloads on the EdgeRouter. E.g. ZFS can be CPU heavy with all of the parity/encryption/deduplication features you can enable and trying to do that on top of using SFTP to transfer the data to a remote host in a single encrypted stream can stress the CPU even more... but this CPU also doesn't look like a typical bargain basement ARM CPU you'd find in cheaper Ubiquiti products and would probably do fine for what it has.

sussexby 4mo ago

It's based on Neoverse N2 which in our other platforms (e.g., ENVR Core, UDM Beast, EF Core) has contributed to vast improvements in performance versus ARM Cortex.

ikiris 4mo ago

This is how they make their money. They put out underpowered crap and constantly churn them so you have to pay them regularly. If something isn't profitable to maintain it just goes EoL.