Synology is a well respected brand in the low to mid-range NAS market. However, they missed a high-end flagship in their lineup to compete against products such as the ReadyDATA units from Netgear and the TS-EC1279U-RP from QNAP. These high-end flagship units support both SATA and SAS drives and serve as a solution for SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises) who don't need all the bells and whistles of a SAN, but still require virtualization support and scalability. Today, Synology is launching their first product to target this market, the RS10613xs+. The unit has 10 bays in a 2U form factor. It can accept both SATA and SAS drives, an essential requirement in this market. (The Synology RS3413xs+ also targets large scale businesses, but doesn't support SAS drives).

The RS10613xs+ can be connected to up to 8 RX1213sas expansion modules, each of which has 12 bays. A system based on the RS10613xs+ can, thus, scale up to 106 SAS drives in total.

The highlights of the RS10613xs+ include:

• Optimization for virtual network storage, with support for both iSCSI and NFS.
• VMWare Vsphere 5, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer certifications.
• VAAI integration, including Hardware Assisted Locking (ATS), Block Zero, Full Copying, and Thin Provisioning.
• Synology High Availability Manager for minimum downtime.
• SSD caching for improved speeds

Unlike the ReadyDATA series (and similar to the QNAP SAS-enabled TS-EC1279U-RP), the RS10613xs+ doesn't offer ZFS. Instead, the unit offers RAID for data redundancy and runs Synology's own OS, the Disk Station Manager (DSM). The detailed hardware specifications are provided below:

Though Synology doesn't explicity specify the CPU, we believe it is the Xeon E3-1240. By default, the unit comes with 4 GbE ports, but a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot is available to accommodate a dual 10GbE card. With link aggregation configured over these 6 links and SSDs in all the 10 bays in RAID5 configuration, Synology claims that the unit provides 2 GBps+ throughput and 200K+ IOPS.

The RS10613+ is priced at $7000 and comes with a 3-year limited warranty, with an option to upgrade to a 5-year plan. Do readers feel that ZFS is essential in this market? Feel free to sound off in the comments.

In other NAS news from Synology, the DS713+ was launched last week. Recently, we have seen a number of Atom-based 2-bay NAS units such as the Iomega StorCenter px2-300d (based on the Intel Atom D525). Synology's latest offering in this space is the DS713+. It has dual GbE links and can be expanded with the DX513 expansion module to become a 7-bay NAS.

The DS713+ has the latest Intel Atom D2701 Cedarview CPU and can deliver up to 202.3 MBps read and 135.84 MBps write throughput as per Synology's claims.