Synology RackStation RC18015xs+ review
Synology’s new RC18015xs+ delivers highly available storage but at a price
The RC18105xs+ performed well during testing and delivered very good NAS and IP SAN performance. Failover is nicely automated but it will interrupt services and for an active/passive fault tolerant solution, it isn’t the best value
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Simple deployment; Automatic failover; Unlimited snapshots; Good performance; Massive expansion
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Pricey; Active/passive architecture interrupts storage services during failover
Cabling and deployment
To create a cluster from two RC18015xs+ appliances, we linked their Gigabit heartbeat ports using a standard Cat6 cable. Each link to the production network requires the corresponding ports on both controllers to be connected and we added a single RDX1215sas disk shelf to both of them using the supplied SAS cables.
Powering both units up automatically turns on any attached disk shelves and we then moved over to Synology's standard discovery web portal for further configuration. This found the cluster and installed the latest DSM software for us.
We loaded a quartet of 4TB WD SAS drives and created a single RAID5 array. We could add extra drives as hot spares or expand the array into them but this solution doesn't support SATA drives.
The DSM Storage Manager shows the physical connections between the controller and disk shelves
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