Commercial NAS Operating Systems - Exploring Value-Additions - Part I

To Be Continued...

A few of the value-additions offered by NAS vendors in their OS have been explored in detail in the preceding pages. In the multimedia segment, QNAP and Synology are way ahead of the rest of the vendors. Asustor is close behind in terms of support for native media features, but, the overall execution leaves lot of scope for improvement. An important component of the multimedia support package is the mobile apps suite, which we haven't covered in this piece. Media servers are an important value-add in the NAS feature set. Every vendor other than ZyXEL has Plex support. Most also support Twonky media server. Netgear seems to have worked closely with Plex to support hardware transcoding on certain ARM models. On the topic of transcoding, for x86-based NAS units - we see QuickSync support for real-time / offline transcoding / downscaling. However, licensing requirements keep altering the feature set of supported audio and video codecs - particularly for QNAP.

On the surveillance front, there is no question that Synology's Surveillance Station 7.2 is hands-down the best native VMS created by a NAS vendor as yet. QNAP's implementation is good, while Asustor's main selling point is the four default licenses with each NAS unit, rather than the user experience. That said, Western Digital supports the Milestone Arcus VMS, which is one of the most user-friendly and intuitive IP camera recording / management applications we have evaluated. In this area, it is necessary to move from proprietary Windows-only programs and plugins to native HTML5 video for IP camera feed tracking and management. Synology has already made the first steps towards this. It is for QNAP and Asustor to follow. Netgear's solution feels ancient (the UI is reminiscent of the early days of ReadyNAS OS). We recommend Netgear or ZyXEL NAS units for surveillance recording only if there is another VMS that just requires a share on a network drive to record to.

On the remote access front, everyone except Asustor seems to support a relay server to enable outside access without port forwarding. Pretty much, everyone has a decent solution here. Supported cloud services for backup and sync are also similar across the board. In terms of features that owe their origins to the cloud services, we see all vendors attempt something, but, with varying success in terms of user experience. QNAP and Synology again hold the edge here, with Western Digital and Netgear providing passable experience. ZyXEL seems to be more focused on the mobile side with their myZyXELcloud relay service.

What lies next? Modern-day computing platforms (even consumer-level PCs) have become very powerful and now allow multiple operating systems to operate in parallel (or, jobs to run in an isolated environment) using the concept of virtualization. While this might appear to be of interest only to professional users, we will see later that even the average consumer ends up using such features without knowing the inner technical details. Traditionally, NAS vendors have equated virtualization support to just providing good iSCSI support - a 'disk' that a virtual machine running on another server can use for OS installation and data storage. More recently, we have seen NAS units themselves run isolated jobs using containers. Some NAS vendors also allow their OS to act as a host OS and support running different operating systems as guests. Virtualization support has also turned out to be a very important value addition in certain market segments.

All NAS units are, at their core, simple computers that have been tuned for a particular purpose. We have also seen that most of the NAS operating systems are usually built upon a standard Linux kernel (some adopt other operating systems such as BSD or Windows also). Therefore, it is only fair for tech-savvy users to expect the ability to run some Linux applications that are not provided as part of the core OS. Unfortunately, in order to provide an acceptable user experience for all, most NAS vendors prefer to keep the OS installation locked down to some extent. The allied features are introduced into the system using third-party applications (that are created using a SDK supplied by the NAS vendor, and guaranteed to work with the particular NAS OS). Therefore, the third-party applications ecosystem is an important factor for many consumers who wish to treat their NAS as a multi-purpose machine. Note that a NAS can have absolutely no third-party apps support, but, can still fulfill all the core requirements for usage as a NAS. In fact, it is likely that most business users tend to use NAS units for a single use-case and rarely use third-party applications.

Some vendors have started integrating business software suites in their NAS OS. For example, Synology offers Office and MailPlus Server (along with a MailPlus client). While the latter set is essentially a privately hosted Gmail alternative (or a replacement for Microsoft Exchange), the former can be treated as an alternative to cloud-based suites like Office365 and Google Docs. A complement to Office is the Note Station app. QNAP has the Notes Station app with similar features. It is worthwhile investigating the extent of such productivity features in the various NAS operating systems.

NAS vendors offer mobile apps to help users interact with their NAS units. Both core and value-add features can be utilized better by consumers with these mobile apps. A detailed review of the various mobile apps will help consumers get an idea of the user experience as well as available features. We will address the above aspects and more in our concluding piece of this series next month.