Current Filter: Storage>>>>>>

   

This compact 2U rack mount appliance provides integral NAS and IP SAN operations and combines these with support for 6Gb/sec SAS and SATA hard disks, SSD caching and options to upgrade to 10-Gigabit (10GbE) speeds.

It also offers an unbeatable expansion potential as its pair of external 6Gb/sec SAS interfaces support up to eight RX1213sas 12-bay disk shelves, allowing you to expand massively to 106 hard disks and a raw capacity of 424TB. The head unit also has a two 2.5in bays hidden behind the pop out LCD display which support SSDs specifically for read caching.

The appliance sports the latest 3.3GHz 'Ivy Bridge' Xeon E3-1230V2 CPU teamed up with a generous 8GB of DDR3 memory which can be expanded to 32GB. Four Gigabit network ports comes as standard and the single PCI-e slot supports optional Intel and Emulex 10GbE cards.

Installation is very swift as Synology's Assistant locates the appliance on the network, prepares the hard disks and loads the DSM (Disk Station Manager) software. We tested using three 4TB WD Enterprise SAS 2 drives configured as a RAID-5 array.

You can create a single volume but Synology's Disk Group feature supports multiple volumes within a single RAID array. NAS shares are simple to create and IP SANs are configured from the same Storage Manager interface. The latter offers enterprise level features such as thin provisioning, LUN cloning and 256 snapshots per LUN.

Synology won't be beaten for general storage features and also offers an impressive range of extra software packages which can be installed on DSM with a single mouse click. Along with Symform, you have support for Glacier which is being offered by Amazon as a lower cost alternative to its S3 hosted backup service.

Synology's Cloud Station provides a file syncing service between a user's local folder and a predefined folder on the appliance in the their home directory. It supports up to 32 file versions and new features include the ability to sync a single shared folder to multiple Cloud Station users and securely encrypt all traffic.

For high-speed performance testing we used the lab's Dell PowerEdge R820 quad E5-4600 Xeon server equipped with an Emulex OCE11102-NM dual-port 10GbE card. We fitted another Emulex dual-port 10GbE card in the appliance and connected it directly over fibre to the test server.

NAS speeds are impressive with the open source Iometer utility reporting a fast raw read speed of 735MB/sec for a mapped share. IP SAN performance was even faster with Iometer showing top raw read and write speeds of 1030MB/sec and 945MB/sec for a 500GB iSCSI target.

To test expansion we added an RX1213sas appliance to the head unit which appeared in the DSM Storage Manager window as soon as we plugged both SAS cables in. We loaded another 4TB SAS drive in the expansion shelf and added it to the existing RAID-5 array.

The array expansion did take 26 hours to complete but access to all volumes, shares and iSCSI targets was available during this time. The SAS connections didn't create a bottleneck either and with the array now spread across four drives, we actually saw a slight improvement to read speeds.

Synology's RS10613xs+ offers a remarkable range of storage features and combines them with the highest expansion potential in its class. It also beats most of the competition in this market sector hands down for value and we found NAS and IP SAN performance over 10-Gigabit networks to be exemplary. ST

Product: RackStation RS10613xs+
Supplier: Synology UK
Tel: 01908 587422
Web site: www.synology.com
Price: Diskless; ????4,690 ex VAT

Verdict: The sheer range of features and the price-performance from Synology's new appliance is very impressive indeed and will certainly have enterprise customers - and competitors - taking a closer look.