SMEs and mid-sized businesses with big network storage demands will approve of Synology’s DS3622xs+ as this mighty desktop cube offers an impressive capacity. With 12 hot-swap drive bays up for grabs, it makes an ideal candidate as a big backup repository or a surveillance recording vault with plenty of room left over for dishing up shared network resources.
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Stepping up as the long overdue replacement to the 5-year old DS3617xs (the DS3617xsII is identical), it employs the same charcoal-black chassis but gets a modest improvement in the CPU department as the quad-core 2.2GHz Xeon D-1527 is replaced by a six-core 2.2GHz Xeon D-1531. Memory doesn’t see any changes though, as you get the same base 16GB of ECC DDR4 memory expandable to 48GB.
Another update is the dual Infiniband expansion ports on the DS3617xs have been replaced by mini-SAS HD ports. These allow the DS3622xs+ to support two DX1222 12-bay desktop units taking storage capacity to an impressive 36 bays.
DS3622xs+ Design and features
The appliance is very well built as the chassis is constructed of solid steel with the removable side panels incorporating discrete cooling grills. The reason the DS3622xs+ supports 48GB is the motherboard has 16GB mounted on its inner surface with two spare SO-DIMM slots on the outside which are easily accessible by sliding back the side panel.
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Cooling is handled by two large 12cms diameter fans which we found to be very quiet during testing. Connection options see big improvements as the appliance offers dual Gigabit and 10GbE copper ports.
The spare PCI-E slot provides further expansion opportunities and the appliance supports a good range of multi-port 10GbE adapters from Synology and Intel. A smart addition is the separate Gigabit management port which is designed to provide extra security as it allows all management traffic to be isolated on a private network.
You must pay attention to Synology’s compatibility lists for storage as its main focus is on its own devices. Apart from a solitary 4TB WD drive, the only HDDs and SSDs on the list are, unsurprisingly, Synology’s own brands and for testing, we loaded four 8TB HAT5300 HDDs.
DS3622xs+ Offers Great 10GbE performance
For performance testing, we created a RAID5 storage pool and hooked the appliance up over 10GbE to a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. With a NAS share mapped to the server, we recorded top Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.
Real world performance is good with copies of a 25GB test file returning 5.6Gbits/sec and 5.4Gbits/sec for reads and writes. Copying the same file to an encrypted folder averaged 2.6Gbits/sec while backing up a 22.4GB folder containing 10,500 small files returned a speedy 2.4Gbits/sec.
The DS3622xs+ delivered an outstanding performance in our 10GbE iSCSI speed tests
For IP SAN testing, we started with a single 10GbE connection to a 1TB iSCSI target and watched Iometer record sequential read and write rates of 9.3Gbits/sec and 8.5Gbits/sec. To test Synology’s maximum speed claims we added a Synology E10G18-T2 dual-port 10GbE card to the appliance and created a quad-port 10GbE MPIO link to the target.
The DS3622xs+ delivered excellent numbers for sequential read and write rates with Iometer reporting a rock-steady 37Gbits/sec and 18.8Gbits/sec – slightly better than Synology’s results. For random read throughput, Iometer reported only 169,000 IOPS which is some way short of the 260,000 IOPS achieved by Synology, although it did conduct its in-house tests with a full house of 1TB SAT5200 SSDs.
DSM 7 Services
It’s been a long time coming but the DSM 7 software is worth the wait as it offers an impressive range of new features. The web interface has been completely revamped to make it even easier to use with the Storage Manager app providing more information about devices, arrays, volumes plus SSD caches and can now deduplicate data on all-Flash arrays.
Upgrade to DSM 7.1 and you can use the ABB app and agent to backup remote Synology appliances to a central location
One benefit of using Synology’s storage devices is the Storage Manager app can automatically update their firmware when new releases are made available. Security gets even tougher as DSM automatically disables the default administrator username, the security Advisor app keeps you posted on any weaknesses and access controls can be tightened up further with Synology’s Secure SignIn service and 2-factor authentication (2FA).
The cloud has a bigger role to play as the appliance’s configuration can be backed up to your Synology cloud account and the new Active Insights cloud service provides a wealth of remote monitoring features. After declaring the DS3622xs+, we could view graphs of system, network and storage performance, be advised of any unusual login activity, monitor Hyper Backup jobs and send debug logs directly to Synology support.
Synology’s C2 Identity provides SSO (single sign-on) and strong access controls to company resources while C2 Transfer provides encrypted file sharing. Sign up for a Synology C2 Cloud Storage account and you can use the Hybrid Share app to present cloud storage to multiple NAS appliances for local access where they will cache frequently used data for faster access.
Synology’s Active Insights cloud dashboard allows you to remotely monitor all your appliances from one console
We’ve always been impressed with Synology’s Active Backup for Business (ABB) app as it provides free backup services for servers and workstations plus VMware and Hyper-V virtualization hosts and all their VMs. Currently in beta testing, the DSM 7.1 update adds even more and once we’d installed it, we could use the new version of ABB to backup other Synology NAS appliances to the DS3622xs+
Remote appliances require the ABB agent installed locally where you point them at the backup destination appliance. Templates are provided so you can start a backup immediately and secure all the appliance data, its system partition, applications and configuration in one go.
Conclusion
Businesses that want a heap of network storage on their desktop will find Synology’s DS3622xs+ a great choice and although the Xeon D-1531 CPU isn’t a big step up from its predecessor, it does deliver top 10GbE performance. The appliance is solidly built, offers a great expansion potential and with DSM 7 at the helm, provides an impressive range of apps and data protection facilities.
