Synology RackStation RC18015xs+ review

Synology’s new RC18015xs+ delivers highly available storage but at a price

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

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Snap happy

Volume creation using BTRFS is simple and during shared folder creation, we enabled protection and decided whether their snapshots should be visible. From the DPM app, we created manual and scheduled snapshots for selected shares and decided how many hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots to retain.

The same procedures apply to iSCSI LUNs and Synology will also be releasing a Snapshot Manager for taking application consistent snapshots in Windows and VMware environments. Entire shares and LUNs can be restored from DPM by selecting the desired snapshot and starting the recovery process.

We deleted a 50GB folder on one share and restored it from the latest snapshot in under 20 seconds. Visible snapshots show all data natively so we could browse the network share and restore files and folders using drag and drop.

BTRFS support allows you to schedule unlimited snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI targets

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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