IT Pro Verdict

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

Reasons to buy

+
Simple deployment; Automatic failover; Unlimited snapshots; Good performance; Massive expansion

Reasons to avoid

-
Pricey; Active/passive architecture interrupts storage services during failover

By Dave Mitchell

published 24 June 2015

in Reviews

Cluster control

The DSM web console is virtually the same as used by Synology's standard NAS appliances. The only differences are the new High Availability Manager (HAM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM) apps.

The HAM provides an animated status graphic for the cluster and attached disk shelves. From here, we could switch the active and passive assignments, reboot and power either unit off or shut down the entire cluster.

The standard DSM Storage Manager app is used to create RAID disk groups, volumes, IP SANs and SSD caches. It also provides an extra graphic showing the physical connections between the disk shelves and controllers.

The new High Availability Manager app keeps you posted on cluster status

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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.