IT Pro Verdict

Those small and medium-sized businesses that don’t want optional 10GbE upgrades will find that the RS2416RP+ offers a superb range of storage features at an affordable price. Along with good performance, its cloud support won’t be bettered and its snapshots provide valuable data- protection services.

Pros

+
Quick installation; Easy to use;

Cons

-
Bays only accept 6TB drives

Small and medium-sized businesses that are looking for a low-cost network backup repository with slick data protection features will find plenty to like in Synology's RackStation RS2416RP+. This 2U rack NAS is yet another of Synology's ever-expanding business range to support Btrfs, allowing it to provide snapshots and uncomplicated data recovery.

It has 12 SATA drive bays and can be expanded further using one Synology RSX1214xs+/RS2414RP+ 12-bay disk shelf. The carriers in the head unit are big enough to support 8TB Seagate drives.

The RS2416RP+ also comes with 2GB of DDR3, upgradable to 6GB using the spare slot. The four quiet hot-swap cooling fans are a neat touch, but the miniscule motherboard doesn't have a PCI Express slot, so it's not possible to upgrade to 10GbE.

Installation took only 15 minutes as Synology's discovery web portal found the appliance and installed the latest DiskStation Manager (DSM) software for us. With four 4TB WD SATA drives loaded, we chose the default Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) option, which allows drives of different makes and sizes to be used in the same array.

Synology's DSM Web Console is well designed and snapshots are configured from the Data Protection Manager (DPM) app. For NAS shares, it's important to select the data integrity protection option: you can then use DPM to create on-demand or scheduled snapshots and decide how many versions to keep.

They're easy to use and snapshots can be applied to file-level but not block-level iSCSI targets. Synology also offers a Snapshot Manager utility to take application-consistent snapshots of IP SANs, both in Windows and VMware environments.

Recovery using DPM is lightning- quick we restored 50GB of deleted content in a share from its latest snapshot in under 20 seconds. Even better, you can make snapshots visible so that users can restore their own files or use the File Station app to browse snapshots and download or email files directly from DSM.

Snapshots provide only local data protection, meaning you'll need essential off-site backup. Synology's Backup & Replication app provides a wealth of features. We replicated data to other rsync-compliant appliances and to our Amazon S3 cloud account, and Synology also provides apps for Amazon Glacier, ElephantDrive and iDrive.

Want a private storage cloud? No problem, as Synology's Cloud Station lets your users sync local files and folders in real-time from their desktops or mobiles. Install the Cloud Sync app and you can link up with third-party providers such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive.

We tested the Surveillance Station 7.1 beta and rated it highly for its unbeatable IP camera monitoring and recording features. It supports thousands of camera models and its auto-discovery spotted our D-Link cameras and set them up with recording schedules.

The appliance delivered good real-world NAS speeds with a 25GB file copy returning sustained read and write speeds of 109MB/sec and 108MB/sec. Our 22.4GB backup test folder, with its 10,500 small files, was also copied down at an impressively fast 87MB/sec.

The Atom's integral AES-NI encryption engine delivered the goods, with our 25GB file copied to an encrypted share at 88MB/sec. IP SANs speeds are good too, with Iometer reporting read and write rates of 113MB/sec and 109MB/ sec for a 500GB target, increasing to 226MB/sec and 201MB/sec over a dual Gigabit MPIO link.

Those small and medium-sized businesses that don't want optional 10GbE upgrades will find that the RS2416RP+ offers a superb range of storage features at an affordable price. Along with good performance, its cloud support won't be bettered and its snapshots provide valuable data- protection services.

Verdict

2U rack chassis

2.4GHz Intel Atom C2538

2GB DDR3 RAM (max 6GB)

12 x LFF/SFF SATA hot-swap drive bays

supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, SHR, JBOD, hot-spare

4 x Gigabit Ethernet

2 x USB 3

2 x USB 2

InfiniBand expansion port

2 x 500W hotplug PSUs

3yr limited warranty

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.