Synology RackStation RS1219+

Editorial Type: Product Review Date: 2018-09-01 Views: 1,944 Tags: Storage, Synology, RackStation RS1219+ PDF Version:
SMBs short on office space and network storage will love Synology's new RackStation RS1219+ as this is the first short-depth 2U rack NAS appliance to market

At a mere 12in. deep, it'll fit neatly into a 2-post rack or small wall cabinet and its eight hot-plug LFF drive bays allow internal storage capacity to reach an impressive 96TB.

Capacity can be expanded further to 144TB using Synology's 1U 4-bay RX418 expansion shelf. Measuring 325mm front to back, it's only 27mm deeper than the RS1219+ and connects to it via a high-speed eSATA port.

The RS1219+ is well built with a reassuringly solid steel chassis and metal drive carriers. It's perhaps disappointing that Synology chose to power it with a five-year-old 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Atom C2538 CPU but as our lab tests showed, it's more than capable of mustering a decent NAS performance.

It comes with 2GB of DDR3 SO-DIMM memory which can be expanded to 16GB. Port permutations look good as along with the eSATA expansion port, the appliance offers quad Gigabit and dual USB 3.0.

Despite its modest dimensions, the appliance even has room for a half-height PCI-Express expansion card. It supports Synology's dual-slot M.2 SSD card for a caching performance boost or you can upgrade it with a good selection of industry-standard 10-Gigabit (10GbE) network adapters.

For performance testing, we fitted a quartet of 12TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives and an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T card. Deployment is swift as Synology's web portal found the system on the lab network and downloaded the latest production DSM 6.2 software.

We also allowed the wizard routine to create a big 27TB SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) array for us. This is a simpler alternative to traditional RAID as it allows arrays to be easily expanded simply by adding more drives and also swapped on the fly to an SHR-2 dual-drive redundant array.

The RS1219+ delivered a 10GbE performance that tallied closely with Synology's claims. A NAS share mapped to a Dell EMC PowerEdge Xeon Scalable Windows server returned top Iometer sequential reads of 1,105MB/sec and a noticeably lower write rate of 410MB/sec.

We increased the pressure by mapping a second NAS share over a dedicated 10GbE link to another Xeon Scalable Windows server. With Iometer running on both servers, we recorded cumulative read and write rates of 1,402MB/sec and 495MB/sec - slightly better than Synology achieved.

Synology's DSM operating system puts the appliance's big storage capacity to good use as it offers wealth of data protection and backup features. Easily accessible from DSM's well-designed web interface, you can protect on-appliance data with manual and scheduled NAS and IP SAN point-in-time snapshots on BTRFS volumes.

The Hyper Backup app looks after local and remote backup tasks and integrates with Synology's C2 Backup cloud service for essential off-site storage. The Active Backup for Servers app secures Windows and Linux systems to the appliance just using network shares and Synology also offers Active Backup apps for G Suite and Office 365.

The RS1219+ is a great choice for storing workstation backups. The Cloud Station Server app works with the Backup Windows client to provide one-way synchronisation or the Drive agent for two-way folder synchronisations. The slick Surveillance Station app can turn the RS1219+ into a sophisticated on-site video recording vault while the Virtualization Manager app allows it to host just about any OS you choose.

Product: RackStation RS1219+
Supplier: Synology
Price: Diskless, £874 ex VAT Web site: www.synology.com

Verdict: It may be the shortest 8-bay rack NAS appliance on the market, but the RS1219+ packs a lot into its compact chassis. Overall 10GbE performance is reasonable, Synology's DSM software offers a wealth of business-class apps and it's also great value.