Synology Launches Heavy-Duty Storage Appliance for SMBs

Storage specialist Synology last week unveiled two new storage appliances under the Synology XS+ Series. Called the most advanced product to date, Synology touts the new product family as offering an affordable NAS (network-attached storage) solution for SMBs with the enterprise scalability and performance of a SAN (storage-area network).

Designed for mid-sized businesses or small businesses with huge performance requirements, the RS10613xs+ offers 400,000 IOPS and up to 434TB of raw storage capacity with the use of eight RX1213sas expansion units. The RS3413xs+ sports similar performance, but scales to a more modest 136TB of storage with the use of two RX1211 expansion units connected via InfiniBand.

Both the RS10613xs+ and the RS3413xs+ are 2U rack mountable appliances capable of holding 10 hard disk drives (HDDs) of 4TB capacity internally as well as redundant power supplies. Four Gigabit ports and optional dual 10GbE ports — the latter are added with the use of an add-on network interface card — allows for more complex deployment scenarios suitable for use with virtual server deployments. Where raw throughput is desired, the XS+ Series also supports link aggregation.

The new storage devices are optimized for virtual network storage, and supports both iSCSI and NFS. Given the importance of virtualization, the devices are also certified for the top hypervisors such as VMWare Vsphere 5, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.

According to Synology, a cluster of rackstations can be configured with high availability to provide redundancy so that a second server can automatically take over in the event of a server going down. Moreover, the XS+ family comes with support for solid-state drive (SSD) caching to meld the cheap, high-capacity storage capabilities of standard HDDs with the fast access speeds inherent to SSDs. This white paper (pdf) explains how the SSD cache technology from Synology enhances system performance.

“This release marks a major milestone for us,” said Franklin Hua, technical marketing manager at Synology America Corp in the official press release. “This new flagship sets the bar even higher for value. It is ideal for those that need more storage and performance than offered by the standard NAS, but want less hassle and expense than a SAN.”

I reviewed the five-bay Synology DS1511+ NAS on SMB Tech last year, and found it to offer a compelling range of capabilities and a rich feature set that puts many similar products to shame. Synology has also continued releasing regular updates to its Synology DSM operating system, which currently stands at version 4.1.