Synology DS415+

Can Synology’s new four-bay drive for SMBs safely serve your entire office’s backup and storage needs?

Huge increase in RAM. CPU and number of users, shared folders and groups over DS412+. Fast, even with encryption.
2GB RAM is not upgradeable without voiding your warranty. 1080p video transcoding not officially supported either.
Directly replacing the now two-year old DS412+, the previous entry in Synology’s Plus series targeting small-to-medium businesses, Synology’s new DS415+ is its strongest offering in this line to date. The DS415+ provides a significant upgrade over the comparable four-bay NAS box targeting homes and business workgroups – the DS414. The new quad-core Intel Atom processor (2.40GHz) and 2GB DDR3 RAM effectively double the power of the DS415+ over these two previous entries (both are dual-cores with 1GB DDR3) as well as the new DS415play that is aimed at home users and multimedia-oriented setups. Essentially, the DS415+ marks a huge step up in terms of Synology’s NAS devices for SMBs because it’s the first in this series to make use of the new generation of Intel Atom chips.

Another key selling point of this NAS box is the fact that it’s hot-swappable.

The most important change though, especially for the intended SMB market, is the addition of the AES-NI hardware encryption engine made possible with all this extra computational muscle. 256-bit AES encryption can be applied to all shared folders on the DS415+. and this encryption barely has an impact on operational performance when you’re using the device optimally. Using a single gigabit Ethernet cable, you can get around 80/110MB/S upload/ download speeds for encrypted files and folders. But the DS415+ comes with two l_AN ports, not only to provide a backup in case of a cable failure but also because of the device’s new Link Aggregation technology, which enables both ports to be used at once in order to vastly improve throughput. With Link Aggregation enabled, there is barely any noticeable impact at all on the DS415+’s 228/232MB/S read and write speeds – in fact, we kept scraping the gigabit Ethernet ceiling despite the encryption. This huge improvement in the security of Synology’s SMB product is very welcome in the wake of scares like the trojan SynoLocker. while DiskStation Manager 5.1 has also received a raft of security-focused improvements (including automatic security updates).

Another key selling point of this NAS box is the fact that it’s hot-swappable. The four drive bays can be accessed easily by removing the front panel, while loading the drives themselves is as simple as dropping them into the slide-lock enclosures and pushing them back in. Only one of the two fans is operational at a time – the reason for this is to keep DS415+’s noise levels down to that trademark Synology whisper and also to ensure zero downtime in the event of a fan failure. Considering the built-in fan redundancy, the dual LAN ports and support for Synology High Availability (SHA). you can see the care that’s gone into guaranteeing 24/7 operation. Regarding the latter. SHA means that DS415+ can work as part of a cluster with an active and one or more passive NAS boxes, kept mirrored and monitored via handshake technology so that if one box goes down, another immediately steps in.

It’s also worth noting that this model supports VMware. Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix virtualisation environments.

Plus, packages can be downloaded which enable the DS415+ to work as a mail or VPN server. With this on top of the well-known Synology CMS – Cloud Station, which enables offline editing and a history of 32 file versions – as well as the plethora of ways to interact with DS415+. from the simple GuickConnect feature through to FTP. SMB2, WebDAV. NFS, AFP plus SSH and Telnet setups, you really do have an incredibly versatile storage solution here.

The new Intel Atom processor is the key upgrade here, enabling AES-256 encryption with this quad-core beast of a chip that barely impacts performance. DSM 5.1 and the Synology stable of supporting apps mean that creating a private cloud for your small-to-medium business is incredibly simple. With up to 24TB of storage supported, this is a worthy investment to make.

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