QNAP has a range of rack and tower NAS servers that include the ZFS file system, one of the most advanced file systems available, and which aim to protect the integrity of files. The manufacturer has released the new version of QuTS hero, the specific version of QuTS for NAS servers with the ZFS file system. Today in this article we are going to explain all the improvements incorporated in QuTS hero h4.5.2 , the latest version available.
This new version of QuTS hero incorporates two very important features, they have added support for SnapSync in real time, to allow data synchronization for a backup of critical data, in addition, they have also incorporated a QSAL algorithm to avoid the failure of multiple SSDs simultaneously, and avoid data loss. Next, we explain in detail what both functions are for.
Real-time SnapSync: maximum data protection
The first thing to know is that QuTS hero is based on the ZFS file system, a file system specifically focused on data integrity, in fact, it includes data autocorrect, making it ideal for business environments where the information is the most important, and requires proactive data protection. The ZFS file system allows taking almost unlimited snapshots or snapshots, we can take a snapshot every hour without any problem, in addition, thanks to the “Copy on Write” technology the snapshots are taken immediately, without affecting the performance of the whole system.
SnapSync lets you instantly sync data blocks to target storage to ensure the primary and secondary backup NAS have exactly the same data every time, enabling real-time data recovery without data loss and very quickly.
QSAL to mitigate the failure of multiple SSDs at the same time
The adoption of SSD drives in NAS servers is increasing more and more, we must bear in mind that these drives are much faster both in sequential and random read / write, for this reason, it is usually used as an SSD cache to read / write in a very fast storage pool, in addition, it can also be used as a high-speed storage pool, ideal for installing virtual machines and other data that need speed there.
Recovering data from a dead hard drive is much easier than on an SSD, QNAP’s proprietary QSAL algorithm allows to regularly detect the life cycle and durability of an SSD in RAID, when it is below 50%, what QSAL will do is to dynamically distribute the over-provisioning space to ensure that each SSD can be rebuilt before reaching the end of its life cycle. This helps prevent multiple SSDs from failing at the same time, making SSD-based RAID rebuilding impossible. This technology can significantly improve overall data protection for flash storage.
Other QuTS hero features
Other very important features of QuTS Hero are that it incorporates a main memory cache, a second level read cache and also ZIL for synchronous transactions. If you are going to have a lot of storage, you should know that it allows up to 1 petabyte of capacity for each “individual folder”, or also known as a “dataset” in the world of ZFS, in addition, we can configure different types of ZFS RAID, such as RAIDZ- 1, RAIDZ-2 and RAIDZ-3, plus the popular “Stripe” (multi-disk RAID 0) and even Mirror (multi-disk RAID 1).
ZFS incorporates deduplication and compression in real time, which reduces the space occupied in the main storage, ideal to optimize performance and protect the life of the SSD, however, deduplication takes up a lot of RAM memory, therefore, you must have a NAS with 32GB of RAM or more for everything to work properly as the ZFS file system is RAM intensive. Lastly, it also incorporates AES-NI hardware encryption acceleration, WORM (one write, many reads) to prevent modification of saved data, and much more.
We recommend that you enter the official QuTS Hero website where you will find all the NAS servers with this operating system.
