UPS for network equipment

Does any one know if the Unity Serve can be remotely powered down by the UPS?

A very good question - I doubt it - the user reference manual has no info on that. It only describes one shut-down procedure. 

Please ask Naim Support and if you get an answer, I'd love to know it.

Adam

Duncanm,  TT and your own earth stake is correct... Your surging lights etc sounds terrifying .. At least here it is usually a clean on or off with the very occasional brownout when there is overhead wiring damage or transformer damage after a storm ... But a brown out usually goes to a full blackout after a few minutes .. Interestingly some non protected SMPS seem to work during the brownout..

as far as your Unity Serve question I don't know.. as Adam suggests might be best to ask Naim..

There was a pile driver hammering away for most of yesterday that was making everything in the house shake.  Fortunately it didn't cause any power spikes

Mike-B posted:

Hi FatCat,  maybe you have got away with it.  I've never done hot swapping,  but isn't it a slightly more managed process than a power failure.   I believe the big risk is with a power loss when the HDD is running read/write.       

This is absolutely correct. A modern controller still cannot protect against a power outage at the time the heads are reading data to disk. Filesystem types may be more or less prone to data corruption depending on how they journalise or copy-on-write data but they absolutely all have points in the write transaction process at which a sudden failure will result in block corruption. I have spent enough of my career supporting customers who beleived otherwise and were flabbergasted with their 200K storage infrastructure lost data due to an outage where a UPS was omitted for frivolous reasons. Bring into that now common write caching and your scope for data loss increases immensly. Most software in teh financial services mandates completely synchornous write IO to minimise (bot not eliminate) this risk. For common usage and NAS, write caching will almost certainly be enabled to improve performance and write latencies.

In a worst case scenario, the resulting power outage is accompanied by a spike which results in a non recoverable sector on the platter, or worse, for SSD devices a destroyed drive.

That said, no I don't use a UPS. My NAS has fairly static data and the WD Red drives used spin down when not in use. Added to that, I regularly have data shifted to offline "cold storage". To me this was all simpler than fitting a bulky UPS into an already cramped 21U rack at home. There is no wrong answer but don't be fooled about the risks.

Adam Zielinski posted:

Does any one know if the Unity Serve can be remotely powered down by the UPS?

A very good question - I doubt it - the user reference manual has no info on that. It only describes one shut-down procedure. 

Please ask Naim Support and if you get an answer, I'd love to know it.

Adam

Hi Adam

Phil Harris from Naim confirmed today that "The UnityServe does not have any facility for integration in with a UPS for automatic shutdown in the event of a power failure..."

This is what we both thought so have to carry on powering down quickly when power fails while UPS is still running

DuncanM

Thank you!

Did you ask Phil if he recommended using a UPS? Did he think that the lack of UPS integration was something that should be included in future?

A more pertinent question would be whether the disks in a US are configured as RAID1 or non RAID with one disk being an asynchronus cold backup. The difference is subtle but the latter would greatly reduce the need for UPS since the disks would not be perfoming the same IO operation concurrently. You could still end up with a damaged sector on one or both disks but it would not be the same on both disks.

Important to note that redundancy and resiliency are not the same thing. A UPS helps bridge both with a focus on resiliency but in a domestic environment redundancy is enough. The confusing part is that the "Redundancy" in RAID is more about resliency (uninterrupted service) than actual redundancy but like UPS it partially covers both sides of the coin.

If you have room for a UPS then great, but there is no substitute for data backup and RAID is NOT data backup. Raid controllers can die just like the disks they manage and with worse consequences since the proprietary nature of hardware RAID necessitates the same type of controller. If this all seems off topic, it isn't. Since the discussion is really about protecting valuable music libraries, the most cost effective and simple approach for us is always going to be cold storage backup (periodic backup to a disk not in general use) since that can get you back up and running from a wide variety of failures.  Other mechanisms like RAID and UPS cover specific scenarios which is fine until you get hit by the problem that you have not allowed for.

I keep mine simple and low cost by using a Linux box with software RAID so that there is no dependancy on hardware controllers. This way I can (and have serveral times) rebuild the RAID array on another Linux host. And as mentioned, there is a hot-swap cold storage disk I used for period backups of the whole library. I would probably add UPS if I had more free units in the rack but in the current configuration, it wouldn't add anything beyond graceful shutdowns or contunation through a brownout which isn't necessary.

The UnitiServe has only one disk.

Hungryhalibut posted:

The UnitiServe has only one disk.

My estimation of this product just fell off a cliff.

100% Feeling Zen  +  your previous post - no RAID possible & no means connecting a UPS for a soft shut down in a power failure.   

i also found the post from feeling_zen above very useful. thanks.

enjoy

ken

Bananahead posted:

Did you ask Phil if he recommended using a UPS? Did he think that the lack of UPS integration was something that should be included in future?

Hi Bananahead

Phil didn't make any comment re UPS other than US didn't support it, in fact the quote in inverted commas on my post was pretty much his entire reply

The manual on US does recommend backing up to NAS drive which I do 

Thanks feeling-zen for your post, very interesting, I have thought for a while I should back everything up on a separate hard drive stored in a safe place, you have prompted me to get one ordered asap

DuncanM posted:

The manual on US does recommend backing up to NAS drive which I do 

i back up my NAS hosted complete music library onto a seperate hard drive attached to my pc when i do it, but otherwise off-line most of the time.

do i also then need to backup US to NAS in addition? if so, why?

enjoy....

ken

If you have everything on a NAS, what's the US doing?

ken c posted:

DuncanM posted:

The manual on US does recommend backing up to NAS drive which I do 

i back up my NAS hosted complete music library onto a seperate hard drive attached to my pc when i do it, but otherwise off-line most of the time.

do i also then need to backup US to NAS in addition? if so, why?

enjoy....

ken

No you don't. However, additional layers of redundancy are never a bad thing.

If you have a NAS though, then the need for a US becomes questionable. The easy ripping is not to be shrugged off I suppose. Whatever you use as your server, a cold storage backup should be a minimum requirement. You're already doing this manually with an external disk.

It seems the only Naim server that handles this in the box is the NS01 so I am surprised more people haven't opted for it over the US. Though 2TB for a box that size is a bit meh. After HH's enlightening comment it seems that the only US that has any meaning as a product is the SSD version because a solution needs to meet all minimum storage requirements in one box (NS01) or not at all (US-SSD). I don't see any use for a halfway house like the US

I would recommend anyone running a NAS in particular to have a UPS, and a UPS that will signal to the NAS when it needs to shutdown 'gracefully'.  

This is based on an experience I had 3-4 years ago with a Netgear NVX.  Came in one day to find there had been a power cut.  No problem with the disks, but for some reason the OS on the NAS had got corrupted.  I could not get into the OS at all to debug and reset.  

Spoke to Netgear on the phone - they also couldn't get into the OS, said "happens from time to time", and advised factory reset to wipe the drives and reinstall the OS.  

I was not best pleased as (stupid boy) I hadn't made an offsite backup of the music files as I thought RAID was sufficient.  

Fortunately I'm reasonably technically competent, and (with no useful support from Netgear) managed to remount the drive so I could read the data from a PC and recover it.  But it cost me about 3 days of my time.  

My lessons:

- Don't believe a NAS drive is anything like foolproof
- Protect your NAS fully against power cuts/ surges/ brownouts by installing a decent UPS (they're not expensive, certainly by comparison with the sort of money we spend on our Naim kit, and put against the investment made in the music files and tagging themselves) 
- Never pretend you can get away without an offsite back-up

Certainly, I would not have it that power failures are just an HDD issue!  

Richard

interesting. and all makes sense.

i have backup of all my streamed music on a separate drive. i am no longer using the UPS. risky i know. if the NAS drive fails for whatever reason, i should be able to resurrect my music from the backup, to a new disk, or NAS, as necessary. Lets see...  My LAN setup is now much 'simpler'...

enjoy

ken

Ken I agree its simpler without a UPS & you have your collection protected with a backup.  However I consider a few more UPS features that are outside power failure damage as worthwhile in my setup,   and additionally its effects are in play all the time & not only when the power risk is in play.      One of my UPS outlets powers the extension sockets for all my SMPS's  (LAN, phone & broadband) & they are isolated from the mains via the UPS internal isolation transformer, hopefully holding back some/most of the switching noise,  also hopefully some/most (??) of the EMI line noise is reduced by the UPS internal C&D mode filter.  

feeling_zen posted:

Hungryhalibut posted:

The UnitiServe has only one disk.

My estimation of this product just fell off a cliff.

Of all the darts one might throw at the UnitiServe, the fact that it contains only one hdd (or ssd) seems the weakest.  One can, and should, do backups of it.