Network/Storage Upgrade?

[Enquiries]

Hi,

Currently we have a Ds1618+ with 20TB working around the clock on our office. We have 4 workstations + 10 render nodes constantly accessing files over the network, some times even the same files at the same time (specially the render nodes). We have hit a big bottleneck where the NAS can't handle all of this in terms of Network, CPU and RAM.
We had it connected through a 10GBe connection but was quickly saturated and led to tons of connection losses, which meant job failures for the Nodes. That was also probably happening because there were some 10GBe systems at the same time as 1GBe. Once we swapped for a 5 Link aggregation (4 x 1GBe and 1 x 10GBe limited to 1GBe) there wasn't any more saturation problems, just an overall decrease of speed for everyone.
We need to invest in a new solution ASAP as this makes us waste precious time.
Since we've been on Synology for a while I would prefer to stay, but I'm open to other providers.
Right now we were thinking on a NAS with a PCI expansion Slot to put a 40GBe NIC, to connect to a 40GBe switch. Then all the Workstations and Render Nodes would connect to it through 10GBe connections.
Hope you can help us out

Regards

[ed]

Yes, this could be a solution. You just need to make sure get fast enough NAS for such a setup. You will need a Xeon or Intel core i based NAS with at least 8 bays of HDD or SSD. DS3617XS is fairly old, but still capable of heavy lifting. RS3621xs+ is a rack version if you have a server room. Having NVMe cache slots or 2.5inch SSD in the 2x regular HDD bays would speed things up with repetitious data.Before you get expensive 40GbE switch, check if internal media can deliver speeds like that. NAS filled with SSDs will often perform somewhere around 2000MB/s in a perfect scenario. Maybe you should consider 25GbE instead.I hope this helps.