Synology RackStation RS3411xs review

Synology's new rack mount NAS appliance makes the move to a Core i3 processor, is 10-Gigabit Ethernet ready and has dual Infiniband ports giving it massive expansion potential. Dave Mitchell takes the RS3411xs for a high-speed test drive on the lab's 10-Gigabit network. Read this review to see how it fared.

IT Pro Verdict

The RS3411xs scores highly for its huge storage expansion potential using high-speed Infiniband ports and performance over Gigabit Ethernet and 10GbE networks is very good. USB3 and SATA3 support are lacking and we don’t think the dual supply models are worth the extra cash, but the list of features is still impressive making this appliance well suited to SMBs with big expansion plans.

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We also had an RX1211 disk shelf to hand, so we connected this to one of the Infiniband ports and loaded it up with three 1TB SATA disks. A soon as we powered the RX1211 up, it appeared up in the Storage Manager interface ready for use. We decided to create a separate RAID-5 array, but you could expand existing arrays using the extra disks if you wished.

RAID array options are good and we had no problems attaching an RX1211 expansion array using its Infiniband port.

RAID array options are good and we had no problems attaching an RX1211 expansion array using its Infiniband port.

RAID array options are good and we had no problems attaching an RX1211 expansion array using its Infiniband port.

We fitted an Emulex dual-port 10Gbase-SR card in the RS3411xs and connected it to our 10GbE network. We used Dell PowerEdge R515 and Broadberry dual Opteron 4100 rack servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 and equipped with Emulex 10GbE dual-port adapters configured for jumbo frames.

With a direct fibre connection to the appliance we saw Iometer return an impressive raw read speed of 660MB/s for a mapped share on one server. With the second server attached to the other 10GbE port on the appliance and running Iometer on the same mapped share, we saw a cumulative read throughput of 1129MB/s.

These raw speeds translate to fast real world performance as well. Copying a 2.52GB video clip over Gigabit Ethernet returned speeds of 103MB/s and running it over 10GbE saw this increase to 280MB/s. FTP performance was even faster with the FileZilla utility reporting upload speeds of 109MB/s over Gigabit Ethernet and 322MB/s over 10GbE. We also ran the same tests on a share mapped from the array on the RX1211 expansion unit. With both servers running Iometer we saw very similar results showing the Infiniband connection wasn't causing a bottleneck.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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