Introduction
Synology has been producing good quality NAS servers with reliability and assertive features since 2005. Prior to that, they were predominantly a software house, and this is clearly depicted in their ability to deliver great quality firmware that is not just compatible but pleasurable to use. The Synology RS3411RPxs is part of the recent Synology drive towards the Enterprise market, not sure why the enterprise arena seems to be so popular with many vendors. Keeping track and providing SMB solutions is probably a sound business policy, possible venture out to selective parts of enterprise if the convergence of technology dictates it, but that is about all.
Editor's Note: click the photos below for larger images
Figure 1: Synology RS3411RPxs at a glance
The Synology RS3411RPxs has an immense scope of features that includes iSCSI, Virtual client support (VMware, Hyper V and many more), it also has the unique ability to expand using expansion slots which is quite unique to Synology, as all other competitors refer to expansion as stacking via iSCSI, this model and others in the Synology range are adopting the "Expansion" slots to increase volumes, scalability is impressive. Mind you, we are not clear why customers may want to manage such a large single volume, as support becomes a real headache. Multiple Volumes is fine and really totally acceptable. The base price for the RS3411RPxs diskless is $4,999.00 a tad below $5,000.00, that is a little expensive for a 10-Bay system with a specification that is very close to the many of its lower priced competitors.
Figure 2: Synology RS3411RPxs Expansion Slots
The Central Core
At the core of the Synology RS3411RPxs is a Dual Core 3.1GHz processor, we think its Brownlow, but are not certain as we did not wish to meddle with it, Synology should really clarify what Intel family it belongs to. The memory is DDR3 2GB ECC RAM (Expandable, up to 8GB), which is reasonable but not necessarily breath taking, we noticed it suffered after hooking up five VM’s under RAID 5, this mainly as a result of the memory installed, lacking in virtual mode. We did not upgrade as time was prohibitive to us and we needed to press on. As with the Thecus the RS3411RPxs supports 10GbE x 2 add-ons allowing for future speed increase as well as upgrades as and when required.
Figure 3: Synology RS3411RPxs Processor and Memory
Synology are very clear about which drives they expect to be used for integration. Our best endeavors confirm they only list Enterprise quality SATA drives and clearly will not be too pleased if other class drives are used. This is acceptable behavior as a storage server in this class really should only use the Enterprise class drives. The quality of the drives are often more important than the main unit, as when a drive fails the system is prone to loss of data. A recommended list of drives can be found here.
Connectivity is impressive, as is the scalability of the system, with 4 x Gigabit LAN ports that support Link Aggregation Synology provides speed guidelines at its website, we on our part did not test the Link Aggregation feature. 4 x USB 2.0 really rounds up the connectivity aspect along with the 2 x Expansion slots mentioned earlier. The expansion units used with the RS3411RPxs are the 10-bay RX1211RP which is achieved using Infiniband cables that carries a 12 Gb/s SATA signal allowing for maximum throughput. The unit does not have any USB 3.0 ports or eSATA.
Figure 4: Synology RS3411RPxs Connectivity
Figure 5: Synology RS3411RPxs Dimensions
Open, RAID, Set and Store
Unpacking and removing the unit to installing all ten drives took us less than twenty minutes. The packaging is impressive, substantial enough to avoid damage, yet easy to unpack. The drive trays are already installed and only needed removing to add hard disk drives, all the screws were provided with clear instructions making the installation effortless. If you are installing drives please take the necessary steps for using anti-static precaution in case of accidental discharge. We do advise all our readers to consider buying units ready assembled and tested by resellers who are specialist in the storage arena, who also carry out the required testing and burn in process. The important word here is “tested”; if the units are not tested with the hard drives installed to an accepted level to ensure a very low risk of Dead on Arrival (DOA), then don’t buy it with drives installed. Of course this comes at a small price premium and it’s most prudent when purchasing systems with this functionality. Typically a 5 x 1TB will take just under 5 hours to format and be ready for action, so best to get going one evening and by the morning the unit is ready to store. The RAID levels supported are impressive and more than sufficient. Synology Hybrid RAID, Basic, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 5+Spare, RAID 6, RAID 10, the unit also supports RAID migration as well as Volume Expansion. File systems supported are EXT3, EXT4, FAT and NTFS (external). Synology also provides the adoption of Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) that leverages differing capacity drives to be used in a mixed configuration co-existing with new and old drives optimizing investment in drives. Further discussion on RAID options are provided below. Rail Kits are not included and need to be purchased as an option, a somewhat bizarre practice.
Editor's Note: click the photos below for larger images
Figure 6: Synology RS3411RPxs Out of the Box
Prominent Features
The Synology interface is one of the best we have seen and continues to dominate amongst its competitors. The feature set has come a long way and now provides support based on years of listening to its customers as well as proactively adopting change to meet technological advances for easier communications and the need to store large amounts of data. Synology Disk Station Manager (DSM) is currently at version 3.1, it’s easy to use and navigate whilst it adopts a wizard for those needing hand holding its intuitive visual interface does make it easy to find your way round the panel.
Figure 7: Synology RS3411RPxs DSM 3.1
Figure 7: Synology RS3411RPxs DSM 3.1 Home Page
iSCSI with Thin Provisioning
Setting up iSCSI is the simplest we have encountered, totally wizard based it allows creation of LUNS and mapping simply for creating a virtual environment. Full support for Thin Provisioning is provided so as to allow optimization of space utilization simply its on-demand storage space allocation. Synology has managed to provide a set of Webinars on how to create, mount and use an iSCSI target with its storage line.
Figure 8: Synology RS3411RPxs iSCSI
Synology HYBRID RAID.
The Synology RS3411RPxs has an impressive bevy of RAID options to chose from as we as being able to expand capacity on the fly. Many vendors will have you believe you can add two or more drives into an existing array and expand without loss of data in the current volume, we would advise one drive at a time is the safest option, but expand it does, as it will allow RAID migration to the next level, once you go to the next level it is not possible to go back. RAID options of RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 and JBOD are all offered with RAID 6, 10, 50 and 60 being the most critical for deployment as primary storage as well as when the data is critical and requires a high level of protection. The implementation of RAID 50 and 60 is very sound at this level.
Editor's Note: click the photos below for larger images
Figure 9: Synology RS3411RPxs RAID Creation
Figure 10: Synology HYBRID RAID
Backup, FTP, Add-ons and Remote Replication
Aside from redundancy, storing and sharing files centrally, the Synology Data Replicator 3 functions as an internal backup utility allowing local and remote backups. The DESKTOP feature will backup up your Windows desktop as well as your Outlook emails, these are further accentuated with options to backup immediately, Sync or Scheduled. Mac users can take heart with the knowledge Time Machine is also fully supported. The next option is SERVER backup again this feature has three options within its category, Local Backup, Network Backup and Amazon S3 backup. Really this basically allows for backups in any scenario required and will be more than sufficient to get started. Once a backup strategy has been established then decided if the supplied backup program is sufficient or others options need to be considered.
Editor's Note: click the photos below for larger images
Figure 11: Synology RS3411RPxs FTP Setup
Figure 12: Synology RS3411RPxs Internet Wizard Setup
Performance
The Synology RS3411RPxs is a well designed unit and it performed adequately, whilst it may not be the fastest unit ever produced, it does have good performance but also excellent features. The 2GB memory as standard did not help its cause to be compared to other units that have more than twice that installed as standard and on large files the extra memory does assist.
Test Environment
Synology RS3411xs installed with 2TB Seagate Enterprise drives
Firmware Revision: DSM 3.1
RAID LEVEL TESTED: RAID 5
Network
HP ProCurve 1810G-24 Managed Switch
Test Method
We use a Real-World testing utility as well as a realistic Drag & Drop procedure as depicted in everyday normal operations.
Our tests are carried out with a combination of reads and writes, we do not separate the two, both are combined to produce an overall result that depicts the actual performance of the device tested.
This category is one of the most demanding from a file size perspective as the smallest size file is 2GB and the largest being 30GB.
A combination of demanding Video, Audio and Images files are combined to make this the most challenging category of them all.
The Office category is mainly for business users who may compare the typically used business applications, consisting of spreadsheets, databases, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and email management. We have also combined Photoshop based images that are used to cut and paste within a document to make up a 30 page mailer as well as Visio templates used for presentation within a PowerPoint file that exceeds 15GB file size.
Our Third category is a combination of files from the previous two categories to initiate copying, backing up, deleting all content and then restoring from a backup made within the RAID array.
| Synology RS3411RPxs Read/Write Comparative Performance | |
| Video/Audio/Images | 95.61 |
| Office Productivity | 66.62 |
| Copy, Backup and Restore | 80.48 |
Figure 13: MB/s Read/Write Performance Test Results
| Synology RS3411RPxs | |
| MB/s Overall | 80.90 |
Figure 14: Overall Read/Write Test Performance
Overall Conclusion
The RS3411RPxs sports one of the most intuitive management user interfaces we have used, the ease of use and simple wizard based functionality provides Synology with something to be proud off. They have done well in this area as they have on providing pertinent features that are not only compatible but work seamlessly with many other facets of backing up data and providing a disaster recovery solution. The 10-bay rack mount NAS will do well with businesses of all sizes including the enterprise sector that desperately needs to downsize as a result of budget cuts, and align with the storage convergence taking place in storage arena. The system has a keen eye on features and performs well.
We found a Street price of $7,297.00 for the Synology RS3411RPxs 32TB populated with Seagate 2TB Enterprise drives, whilst the Synology RS3411RPxs diskless was $4,999.00 with no drives.
