With this new version that has just been released, we go from the QTS 5.1.X and QuTS hero 5.1.X versions to the new QTS 5.2.X and QuTS hero 5.2X versions. With this version jump, a large number of important changes and new features have been added, so it is an update to take into account if you are a user of QNAP servers. Next, we are going to explain the main changes they have incorporated.
Common news and changes in QTS 5.2 and QuTS hero 5.2
The manufacturer QNAP has incorporated the main new features in both operating systems, in fact, it is essentially the same operating system, but with a different file system.
The first important change is related to the SMB transmission over local network, now we will have a much faster access speed and better system performance. Both operating systems allow you to use the processor kernel mode to speed up transfers, while maintaining the user mode that is necessary for other SMB functions. In kernel mode, the operating system can effectively coordinate hardware resources. We will notice this improvement especially in all-flash environments, that is, where all the storage is NVMe SSD and we do not have any bottleneck. QNAP has published the figures they have achieved with an all-flash NAS and four 25Gbps links through the local network, and that with this new function we almost tripled the reading and writing performance. Below, you can see the important difference in performance:
In order to protect SSD drives with encryption, QNAP now supports support for TCG-Ruby self-encrypting drives (SED). This standard provides encryption to NVMe drives, facilitating compliance with regulations such as GDPR. The SED drive uses an encryption processor built into the drive itself to encrypt and decrypt all data, without the NAS’s main CPU having to do this work.
Now the software Security Center has improved to proactively detect one of the most dangerous threats: ransomware. Thanks to this functionality, when Security Center detects relevant changes in the NAS activities, the system takes protective measures completely autonomously, either protecting access and deletion, making an automatic backup or interrupting the process.
Other improvements incorporated in the new firmware are support for OpenSSL 3.0.9 LTSit is also compatible with the 802.1X standard authentication in enterprise network environments, and we even have App Armor to improve system security and mitigate security threats. If you have several NAS servers and you have them registered in myQNAPCloud, we can now see a list of the installed applications and have the applications installed quickly on the new NAS, thus saving a lot of time when installing everything. Now we can also Sign in to Active Directory domains more conveniently, now if we use the domain service and connect it to Windows Server, we will be able to log in with those domain users to access the NAS. In addition, now we will be able to calculate the size of the snapshots for efficient management of storage space in the different sets that we can create, in this way, we will be able to know very easily with data and graphs how much they are taking up, and we can also define a time range if you take daily snapshots.
If you are a user of QNAP NAS servers You may have noticed that the startup and shutdown speed is really slow, and it can take up to 10 minutes to turn off and up to 20 minutes to start up and have all the services available. In the case of QTS the speed has been increased by up to 30%, perfect so that it takes much less time. In the case of QuTS hero the improvement is 50%, so we hope that this improvement will allow users to restart their NAS much faster.
Regarding backup copies of the NAS’s own configuration, previously a BIN file was generated and downloaded to the PC, but no details of the copy were displayed. To restore it it was necessary to use that file, and it must be the same model and firmware version as the backup. Now QNAP has improved backups greatly, because we can backup different parts of the configuration, and we can see the details of the backup content, as well as the system, network and privilege settings, in addition, we can encrypt the backup. To restore it, we can choose what to restore, and now we can “mix” NAS models and even firmware versions (as long as we have version 5.2 or higher).
What’s new in the QTS 5.2 system
The manufacturer QNAP has incorporated some functions specifically into this version of the operating system. Now we can perform an automatic recovery of involuntarily disconnected disks, this allows us to speed up the RAID group rebuild process and improve storage stability. This same feature would also be available in the manufacturer’s DAS that have RAID, depending on the model and firmware version, we can activate this functionality.
This feature is activated from «Control Panel > System > Hardware > General > Enable automatic disk recovery«. The manufacturer indicates that activating this feature could cause a slight decrease in the writing speed to the internal storage.
The rest of the features are common to both operating systems.
What’s new in the QuTS hero 5.2 system
The only change specific to QuTS hero is related to the permissions of the folders with QuTS hero and the ZFS file system. Now we can disable the inheritance of permissions on a certain folder, and we can choose between eliminating all inherited permissions, or converting them to explicit permissions. When editing the permissions of a shared folder, we can replace all subfolder and file permissions with permissions inherited from the shared folder.
In the event that you edit the special Windows permissions of a user or group in a specific folder, we can now choose to apply them to the files or subfolders there are.
As you can see, the new QNAP QTS 5.2 and QuTS hero 5.2 operating systems are an evolution of what we already had. They have incorporated very important features to improve performance, both in storage and also in booting and shutting down the NAS server. Soon in RedesZone we will test all these changes and improvements, checking if we actually improve the startup speed.
