QuTS hero

QuTS hero edition

High-performance ZFS-based operating system with greater reliability

ZFS-based QuTS hero ensures performance and data integrity

Faced with the explosive growth of data, VDI popularity, increasing SSD adoption, 8K media, and other disruptive IT trends, modern businesses need dependable storage systems to meet future demands. QNAP’s new “QuTS hero” operating system combines the app-based QTS with a 128-bit ZFS file system to provide flexible storage management, comprehensive data protection and optimized performance to meet the needs of business-critical applications.

Learn More: Why QNAP business NAS uses ZFS

Empower your business - Upgrade to QuTS hero now!

Improve your storage performance with inline data deduplication, compression, and compaction

  • Inline Data Deduplication

    Inline deduplication is block-based and is carried out before data is written to storage. This greatly optimizes storage usage while significantly decreasing storage capacity requirements.

  • Inline Compression

    Compress data to reduce storage I/O workloads for improved performance. In VDI, deduplicated virtual desktops are easily cached to achieve optimal virtual desktop performance.

  • Inline Compaction

    Especially helpful for increasing SSD storage efficiency when highly-repetitive data or massive small files (e.g. transaction logs of banks or e-commerce) are generated. It delivers higher cost efficiency for all-flash storage systems.

Self-Healing ensures data integrity and reliability

Data integrity is key to the reliability of applications and databases. As SSD adoption grows, businesses will encounter a greater risk of data loss as it is difficult to recover data from a dead SSD. Designed with a focus on data integrity, ZFS uses end-to-end checksums to detect and correct silent data corruption caused by hardware defects, bugs in firmware or metadata errors. If an integrity violation is detected, ZFS automatically repairs the damage using data from another mirror before the data is passed to applications. QuTS hero is also WORM (Write Once, Read Many Times) compliant to ensure that data, once written, cannot be modified.

Robust data protection and flexible capacity utilization with RAID Z

QuTS hero supports conventional RAID configurations (RAID 0 (Striped), RAID 1 (Mirror), RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, RAID 50, and RAID 60) and adds support of RAID Triple Parity for protecting against three-disk failures and Triple Mirror for an identical copy of data stored on three disks. Designed to deal with petabytes of data, RAID Z demonstrates an outstanding tool for creating ready-to-use high-capacity RAID in a matter of seconds.

Multi-level cache technology with both read and write boosts performance

ZFS simultaneously supports main memory read cache (L1 ARC), SSD second-level read cache (L2 ARC), and ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) for synchronous transactions. The L1 ARC works with the L2 ARC to minimize hard drive access requirements while boosting read performance. The ZIL is useful for applications with large synchronous random write workloads (such as databases), as data will be written to the ZIL first and then written to storage, helping to decrease latency and improve write performance.

Snapshots multiply backup protection

  • Near-limitless, instant snapshots bring you peace of mind

    Supports up to 65,535 snapshots for iSCSI LUN and shared folders (if 1 snapshot is created every hour, 24 snapshots per day, then up to 7 years of snapshots can be created without needing to delete any!). Copy-on-write technology makes snapshot creation almost instantaneous without affecting ongoing data writing.

  • Snapshot Replica simplifies data protection

    Efficiently replicates snapshots to a remote server by copying only the changes made. This can save time and bandwidth, and can be run manually or on a scheduled basis.

  • SnapSync for remote snapshot replication enables enterprise-class disaster recovery

    Supports block-level SnapSync for remote snapshot backups. It only transfers changed data to save required storage space and to improve backup speeds. Real-time SnapSync ensures that when a change is made to the files in the target storage space, a remote replication will be processed. In the event of a primary site failure, SnapSync assists businesses to resume essential services in the shortest time.

    (SnapSync will be available from Q3 2020)

Pool over-provisioning ensures write performance

With Pool Over-provisioning, space can be flexibly reserved in a storage pool to allow new data to be written into a complete block even if the pool is almost full, thus improving the performance of fragmented pools. For write-intensive workloads and performance-demanding applications (such as SQL transaction logs, backups, surveillance, and medical videos) you can set higher pool over-provisioning to attain higher write performance.

When big blocks are written to hard drives

When small blocks are written to SSD

About NAS migration and RAID management for QuTS hero

As ZFS metadata management is different from Ext4, QTS-based NAS drives cannot be directly used by a QuTS hero-based NAS (and vice versa). Users can install new hard drives to start QuTS hero. If QTS users want to use their existing drives in QuTS hero, they must first ensure all of their drive data has been backed up, and then initialize the hard drives. It is recommended that users thoroughly evaluate their storage needs before installing QuTS hero.

Expanding the storage capacity of a QuTS hero NAS requires adding a complete RAID group to the Storage Pool. Once a RAID group is created, it does not support expanding a RAID group by adding an individual hard drive and does not support migrating RAID levels. Users can allocate spare hard drives for Hot Spare protection or creating additional RAID groups. Users must have enough drive bays to facilitate storage expansion needs in the future when configuring storage in different stages.

Storage expansion methods QuTS hero operating system QTS operating system
Add an individual disk to an existing RAID group -----
Add a RAID group to a Storage Pool
Replace all member disks of a RAID group with higher-capacity disks
Connect JBOD expansion units

QuTS hero benefits

  • Data Protection

    Data integrity with self-healing capabilities

  • Outstanding Performance

    Integrated SSD read/write caching for business efficiency

  • Flexibility & Reliability

    Flexible capacity management and reliable data backups

  • Feature-rich QTS Apps

    Expand NAS functionality without extra costs

Includes the full QTS App Center

QuTS hero includes the full App Center ecosystem, allowing you to boost your NAS functionality with tools for backup/sync, business, content management, surveillance, productivity, and much more.

  • Comprehensive backup

    HBS centralizes backup, restoration, synchronization, and features QuDedup technology to deduplicate backup data at the source to accelerate backup and restoration. HBS is an incredible asset for managing 3-2-1 backup strategies.

  • Virtualization and containers

    Virtualization Station and Container Station facilitate flexible and economical virtualization applications. The Network & Virtual Switch app boosts interoperability between QNAP NAS, virtual machines, containers, and physical network interfaces while fulfilling easy management of both virtual and physical networks.

  • File synchronization

    Qsync simplifies file sync between NAS, desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices, while also allowing timely group file sharing for optimized teamwork efficiency.

  • Enterprise cloud backup

    Boxafe allows you to backup or sync files, emails, calendars and contacts from Google™ G Suite and Microsoft® Office 365® into the NAS to safeguard enterprise cloud data.

  • Fibre Channel support

    By installing a Fibre Channel card in your QNAP NAS, it can be added to an existing SAN environment at an affordable price point to fulfill requirements for high-performance storage and backup.

  • Cloud gateways

    Includes over 20 mainstream cloud service providers, and features HybridMount file-based cloud gateway and VJBOD Cloud block-based cloud gateway services. These allow you to easily mount public cloud storage on NAS for near-unlimited storage potential and low-latency access.

Affordable Fibre Channel SAN storage solution for post-production

Storage Area Networks (SAN) deliver reliable high performance, making it a preferable storage option for post-production environments that require low-latency and fast data transfer. By using a QNAP 16Gb/32Gb Fibre Channel card, a QuTS hero NAS can be easily added to existing SAN environments at an affordable price point. With exceptional IOPS performance, powerful data reduction capabilities, self-healing against silent data corruption, and comprehensive backup/restoration features, QuTS hero NAS provides a perfect high-capacity, FC-compatible data center for professional video studios.

Learn more: QNAP 16Gb/32Gb Fiber Channel expansion cards

Tiered storage configuration for a QuTS hero NAS

Follow these steps to acquire optimal storage efficiency and performance for QuTS hero.

  • Step 1: System Drive

    The first Storage Pool you create will be the system drive. Creating an SSD RAID with at least two SSDs for the system drive is recommended.

  • Step 2: Read Cache & ZIL

    Use more SSDs for read cache or ZIL. You can also install QM2 expansion cards to add M.2 SSDs for expanding cache space.

  • Step 3: Data Storage

    Allocate HDDs/SSDs to create a RAID for storing files and application data. If needed, you can configure an all-flash configuration for optimal performance.

Производительность передачи файлов

По сравнению с операционной системой QTS, новая QuTS hero предлагает лучшую производительность передачи данных и возможность реализации всего потенциала сетей 10 Гбит/c.

Операционная система QuTS hero QTS 4.4.1
iSCSI 1*4 КБ Произвольная запись 33917 11191
Произвольное чтение 93407 88152
SMB 3.0 1*4 КБ Произвольная запись 34168 11367
Произвольное чтение 67922 80669
SMB 3.0
Копирование файлов		 1*10 ГБ Запись 1154 1136
Чтение 1162 1142
SMB 3.0
Копирование файлов		 10000*1 МБ Запись 256 26
Чтение 453 51

Встроенное сжатие данных помогает повысить скорость передачи данных: при одновременной передаче файлов от нескольких клиентов на NAS под управлением QuTS hero с включенным сжатием данных производительность в 1,6 раза выше, чем в случае операционной системы QTS или QuTS hero без него.

Notes

  1. QuTS hero requires a NAS with at least 4GB memory.
  2. Inline Data Deduplication requires a NAS with at least 8GB memory (at least 32GB memory is recommended for optimal performance).