Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS

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.

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.

> "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.

Store page: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products...

$3999

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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 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.

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

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Looks interesting, but likely lacks FIPS support which makes it an issue for companies that work with the government.

I've never been a fan of Ubiquiti's proprietary solutions, but this might actually be one product that I can be enthusiastic about.

Did we decide ZFS is good after all this time?