alt Hacker NewsUbiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
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Ubiquiti's biggest feature is no monthly recurring cost. I really hope they continue the streak on products like this. Seems like anything else bought up these days is switched to an MRR model with no vision into the long term viability.
The biggest concern about Ubiquiti to me is still its software/infrastructure quality.
Off top of my head, besides all the UI/UX glitches:
- They once allowed a human employee to access static AWS root access key.
- Their employee once claimed "remote access" was end to end encrypted, but later people figured out they probably just meant TLS in transit.
- They had a configuration error that allowed some users to access other users' camera feeds. They corrected the error, but never explained how the hell was it even possible or if they made any architecture design change to prevent that from happening again.
Now, ZFS is nice. But even after years of iterations, I still need to do 50% of my operations via SSH on my Truenas system. I can't imagine Ubiquiti to do any better
Isn't this the name of some other company or something already? Come on you can throw together letters randomly and come up with something original. Get AI to help maybe?
> "Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 ports and redundant power supplies for resilience"
Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing.
Instead I just threw up my hands and replaced all the spinning disks with NVMe drives for the data I actually shared (8x 4TB NVMe drives.) And now it very usable and no need for LRArc, etc. Random or streaming access is equally fast.
Best choice I made. Now I did do this over a year ago so I skipped the NVMe price inflation.
I still keep 4 spinning disks but it is for archival data that I expect to never access unless something bad happens. It is slow and I use it like a tape drive.
Ubiquiti has another cool device: a little travel router that you can configure with WireGuard to VPN into your home network and make yourself safer while on coffee shop and airport wifi.
It is nice to be able to access your local NAS and LLMs while away from home too.
Store page: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products...
$3999
“Enterprise”
First hand experience many times over: there is little more regrettable than placing Ubiquitis latest test-it-in-prod release in to an Enterprise setting.
I was literally looking today to see if there was any news on this, because it’s been widely assumed that they’d release it.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
Ubiquiti is an interesting company. It seems to be well-managed
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/tech-firm-ubiquiti-suffe...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/06/crooks-use-hacked-router...
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/ubiquiti-insider-hacker-sen...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/31/22360409/ubiquiti-network...
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/ubiquiti-insider-hacker-sen...
https://www.theregister.com/security/2022/03/30/ubiquiti-sue...
In the case of the fake whistleblower, it sued a journalist for defamation but its counsel could not spell the word "damning"
Was it meritless. Would it have been dismissed for failure to state a claim
If yes, this might explain why Ubiquiti agreed to a stipulated dismissal
https://dn721900.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.52...
Is this some xBSD or UniFi OS (debian) with ZFSoL? Can't tell from what they've written. 8C+64GB: enough for essential block+file service, but not for dedup and other demanding ZFS features. Also, doesn't appear the controller is redundant; just the power supplies. iSCSI is headlined; nice they didn't limit this to file. No mention of object store, or NVMe-oF.
Seems like a nice, basic, affordable platform for workgroup/SME stuff. Not NetApp/Pure Storage "enterprise" grade though.
It's nice that they're doing this, but don't bet the farm on this product until they release a second version. Not saying I've been burned by them pulling a product and then memory-holing its existence, but, um.
Been a long time fan of Ubiquiti, and I think this product will do particularly well in small-medium businesses. Think of the local marketing firm with 40 employees. They likely have an office with Unifi networking, and they LIKELY hire an MSP to do their IT work. An MSP will easily try to sell this as their storage solution since they can manage the infrastructure with one login to the UBNT dashboard.
This is interesting, I'm not sure I fully understand how this compares to their UNAS offerings. I can't remember off the top of my head if UNAS does m.2 cache drives.
I bought the 8-bay UNAS ($799.00) but have yet to put a drive in it yet since the costs are out of control for hard drives currently. I'm still using my 2x 12-bay Synology for now.
I hope they don't abandon or lose focus of their UNAS offerings (and/or they get better) since I had planned to buy 2-3 more 8-bay UNAS units once I can afford the drives for them.
Will this support expansion in the case of all bays being filled?
EDIT: Nevermind, the product page has an option to add up to 32 additional drives via expansion units. Nice!
The price looks kinda rough. I built a server that stomps this for under a grand (vs their 4k). Stronger CPU, likely faster ram, optane zfs cache instead of nvme...
Admittedly my 1 grand is referenced off pre AI insanity pricing. Call it 1.5 today
Point is someone willing to roll the dicey on AMD consumer CPUs doing ECC can beat everything else out there
[for those contemplating...asus crosshair viii dark hero is where you want to start looking ) And reminder that these boards take UDIMMs not RDIMMs...do not assume suppliers understand the difference
I always forget that these things aren't for me. My immediate thought is always immediately "just build your own NAS with a vanilla Linux box and set up Samba or something because then you can make it however you want".
But of course, if I'm someone who knows how to build a NAS and is inclined to do such a thing, then I'm sort of inherently not the kind of person that would be interested in such things and not the audience they're marketing towards, which is obviously fine.
i like their gear, I bought a whole bunch, but I couldn't and can't figure out how to give my wife access to their Protect app as well. It's absurd to the point where their MFA sent doesn't work when trying to authorize her - and judging by reddit posts etc I'm not the only one. Such mundane things are where UI falls apart, wrong details. Instead of giving elves resources to pack each individual rackmount screw, if they spent some more time on workflows and software, they'd be a truly great company.
> with ... no firmware restrictions on drive models, organizations can scale capacity without being restricted by proprietary hardware ecosystems.
This looks like a dig at Synology, who do this.
I really want a object store in my storage appliance :(
Would be nice to have a CSI, but I can probably just use democratic-csi like I already do on my homemade ZFS based storage appliance.
To be that person, trusting a vendor for an out-the-door NAS is nice from a usability perspective, but also:
Ubiquiti is famous for abandoning products and entire product lines, so I'm going to remain extremely skeptical.
What is the current state of ZFS? I know it had some licensing issues traditionally, despite it being a delight to use every time I've tried it. Is it back?
Ubiquiti bubble is so tiring, it is like AI bubble and Apple bubble. These people live within a bubble.
Overpriced piece of hardware that you will never own because it runs proprietary firmware, you are forced to install apps to take full advantage from those devices.
I am highly interested in this, especially if it works well with Time Machine to do backups over the network. I've got a fully 10GbE + WiFi 7 network w/ Ubiquiti gear already, would love to ditch my janky DIY NAS setup for something that is integrated with the rest and could potentially give me a better backup setup for my photography as well as enough storage to act as a media server.
Eh I gave up on ubiquiti (for home/small office).
Their UI is pretty (lmao ui.com) but their software is terrible, unreliable. Logs are filled with errors which is "normal" etc.
What am i missing here? They should have been using ZFS all along.
Sounds like a marketing piece frankly.
Isn't this massively overpriced? What does this buy you over a supermicro box running ubuntu?
My experience of Ubiquiti is through their Dream Router 7. What a piece of crap that is. Can't even get good WiFi in adjacent rooms where same ancient Asus router wasn't breaking a sweat. Connection drop outs are a nice bonus. Don't forget booting for ages, fan noise etc.
If other products are so bad like that one, I don't know what is the hype for this company.
I'm reminded of the Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" for which ZFS was originally developed. 48 SATA drives packed in a slide-out rack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w
I have enough dollars and hours invested with Ubiquiti to have an opinion here.
They manage to make performant, capable hardware for a decent price. Then they give you shit configuration tools, a shit configuration experience, vendor lock in, and forced to the cloud. So on balance no thank you per my personal priorities.
If you expect cloud and vendor lock in is a plus that you’re accustomed to with other maybe enterprise vendors, by all means.
This… this is just a low-content marketing page. Have we really sunk so low?
Anyone know what types of full disk encryption this will support?
Looks interesting, but likely lacks FIPS support which makes it an issue for companies that work with the government.
I built a 12-bay NAS recently. I snagged a 5900X/Supermicro server board/128GB DDR4 ECC combo for only $680 on eBay right before memory prices went apeshit. It has IPMI and 2x10g. Suffice to say I belive you can roll your own appliance like this for considerably less money, and have far more control over it. I say this as a Unifi fanboi.
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Nice that it's plain OpenZFS, no paid license layer, yay! Ubiquiti sometimes ships v1 hardware and ghosts their own roadmap, but this kinda neuters the downside. If they lose interest, you just pull the disks and zpool import on any box (assuming feature flag parity). That's a saner path than Synology, with their "unauthorized" drive warnings.
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I've never been a fan of Ubiquiti's proprietary solutions, but this might actually be one product that I can be enthusiastic about.
I'm glad to see UBNT in this space.
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.