SA3400 it is a storage NAS Synology highly scalable, designed to enhance business and ensure the connection of up to 180 storage drives.
This model rackmount full format (88x482x724 mm) is based on Intel architecture and has been designed to handle important workloads, in virtualized / containerized environments. The hardware base, complete and balanced, can be expanded on various fronts, to facilitate the development of high-intensity workloads.
The custom-made motherboard houses the Intel Xeon D-1541 CPU, a component designed for servers with 8 cores and a maximum clock of 2.7 GHz. It is a processor from the Broadwell series, capable of managing up to 16 threads and up to 128 GB of ECC memory on two channels.
Even if it’s not very recent, this unit boasts important technologies for the scalability of active tasks and for stable execution of multiple services in parallel. This Xeon model indeed benefits from the features Intel AES New Instructions, Secure Key, Intel Trusted Execution Technology, Execute Disable Bit, OS Guard, Virtualization Technology (VT-x), Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) e VT-x with Extended Page Tables (EPT).
The standard equipment includes a bench of 16 GByte ECC RDIMM DDR4 memorybut it is possible to easily expand the available RAM up to 128 GByte, integrating a maximum of four modules of 32 GByte each.
The 2U chassis allows a rational layout of the internal components. The motherboard is housed in the rear section, while in the center there is an inspectable and removable basket with hot-swap fans.
The front section includes the backplane for disks with Serial ATA interface 12 drawers with retention mechanism and plastic closure. The internal structure of the drawer is made of metal and allows you to fix 3.5″ drives, but also 2.5″ ones, for the immediate integration of SSD drives.
Connectivity and scalability
On the connectivity front, the SA3400 boasts four Gbit LANs and due to 10 GbE, ideal for creating multiple network configurations, for aggregation and management of potential fail-over of an interface.
The connections USB 3.2 Gen 1 allows you to connect removable drives, external expansions and facilitate dialogue with external devices such as UPS.
This NAS features two empty PCI Express Gen3 x8 slots, ideal for integrating NVMe accelerators (not available as standard via the motherboard), or fiber channel LAN adapters with performance above 10 Gbps.
A third x16 format PCIe slot is occupied by the SAS12G controller which has three internal SAS/SATA channels and is directly connected to the disk backplane, each driving four drives. The same controller provides a port rear expansion SAS OUT high performance. External RAID enclosures will in fact work with the same performance as internal drives.
Precisely this ensures very high scalability, simply by connecting expansion units such as RX1217sas with 12 disk slots, or the high-density versions RX2417sas, with 24 2.5” slots. The system allows you to aggregate up to 7 linked external units, to reach a total maximum of 180 HDD/SSD connected simultaneously.
Storage and functionality
Thanks to the presence of 12 bays, this Synology NAS is suitable for the management of different data pools and mixed volume allocation, for example to manage cold data, virtual machines, archives, backups or production data.
Basic level data storage is provided by file system support BTRFS, a safe environment designed to best manage modern work patterns. Your information is also protected thanks to the automatic file repair function. Corrupt documents are detected and repaired through the use of mirrored metadata. The process is automated.
BTRFS guarantees support snapshotwhich provides additional security for shared folders and LUN. File- and folder-level data recovery offers greater flexibility when you need to recover only a specific file or folder.
For efficient management of users and data space, the system allows you to enable quotas for users or shared folders.
The platform is capable of managing online data compression functions. They are compressed before being written to the drive, a detail that allows you to make better use of disk space, reducing write commands to the drives.
Thanks to the operating system DiskStation Manager, businesses can save, share and sync files by creating a private cloud very easily. Additionally, all data can be automatically backed up with a variety of free licensed solutions, giving you added benefit at no additional cost.
All this can be done from any device that allows you to share and synchronize files, back up data while keeping it safe and above all to set up a server VPN on the NAS, thus allowing users to remotely and securely access files saved on the NAS or stored on devices connected to the local network.
Via package add-on VPN Server, Synology NAS transforms from a device solely responsible for data storage into a VPN (virtual private network) server, which can be configured and managed remotely through the specific Web interface which also allows you to monitor simultaneous connections and verify VPN logs.
Synology Drive and Office, integrated productivity
Synology Drive offers storage capacities ranging from one to hundreds of terabytes, saving disk space and bandwidth on your PC with on-demand sync, and allows you to enable scheduled or real-time backup for important folders, so you have them available in case of accidental deletion. This way employees in each office can upload or download files from those folders using SMB/AFP at the speed of a LAN.
This platform allows you to start remote backups and easily enable collaboration between employees, customers and smart working workers.
Synology NAS supports Windows AD, Azure AD e LDAP to interact seamlessly with existing directory services. A simple migration of files together with domain ACL permissions from existing Windows Server is thus possible. This ensures immediate use of shared folder storage capacity by configuring user quota.
Synology Office allows you to create documents, spreadsheets and slides easily and with maximum efficiency, while real-time synchronization and low costs allow the team to work with maximum productivity, also guaranteeing data security. Members can collaborate simultaneously on the same document and interact by leaving comments that promote productivity and effective collaboration.
Similarly, the server Synology NAS can be used profitably as a mail server, thanks to MailPlus, and as a collaboration and direct interaction platform, using Synology Chat.
Productivity apps and solutions
Among the packages available for this NAS, Active Insight is a large-scale device monitoring and diagnostics solution, while Hybrid Share combines the flexibility of storage C2 and its synchronization capabilities with on-premise solutions.
In practice, C2 allows you to store your device’s data through copies in Synology’s European or US cloud storage. This is a further protection measure, to safeguard company assets, crucial for off-site duplication and usable for disaster recovery activities. The platform in question therefore offers the advantages of the cloud, in terms of security and scalability, protecting companies from possible inconveniences or difficulties in the event of critical events affecting the IT infrastructure and beyond.
By aggregating cloud services and on-premise Synology devices, companies will have maximum data protection, information redundancy and high performance thanks to local cache.
Integrated protection allows bare-metal recovery for all-encompassing security of data, OS and external drives. The system is already available for Microsoft environments and will soon be available for the Microsoft 365 family of services and macOS.
The transmitted data flow is protected end-to-end, with client-side AES 256 / RSA 4096 encryption, transfer over HTTPS and encrypted writing on the C2 Data center.
Plus, thanks to C2 Identity you can simplify cross-site domain management. The centralized asset management system supports authentication for internal and external services (LDAP, SAML, OIDC) and is compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Adobe CC, Zoom, the entire range of services Synology and much more.
Con C2 PasswordHowever, it is possible to achieve centralized management of access keys via a digital wallet.
Test e performance
For the tests we used the test server with Intel Core i7 CPU, Asus XG-C100C 10 GbE LAN adapter and Windows Server 2019 Standard operating environment.
The drives provided by Synology (11 3.5″ HAS5300-8T 8 TByte drives) were aggregated into a single RAID 5 array, to simulate workloads on large storage pools.
The RAID array is able to exploit the potential of the single one 10 GbE connection, with reading speeds of 956.2 MB/s and writing speeds of 982.3 MB/s.
Performance in SMB / CIFS folder sharing mode for mixed network environments shows excellent behavior with large files, with over 678 MB/s file writing. The adoption of smaller files (between 10 KByte and 100 MByte) brings the general speed to 348 MB/s writing and 249 MB/s (reading).
Security snapshot generation occurs at speeds exceeding 652 MB/s.
Managing multiple iSCSI Targets does not slow down the Xeon processor: 685 MB/s and 749 MB/s are reached, respectively in writing and reading.
The consumption of this rack NAS is in line with the competition in the sector. In idle, the NAS with the 11 drives has an absorption of approximately 114.8 W, reaching peaks of 189 / 195 W at full load.
PRO
High performance in all conditions; dual 10GbE as standard; effective ventilation; hot-swap fan bay; dual-PSU; dedicated SAS/SATA controller.
AGAINST
Plastic locks; the display is missing; no front I/O ports; Noisy PSUs; Older CPU; missing M.2 slots as standard.
General characteristics Manufacturer Synology Model SA3400 Website Price (VAT included) 6,157.34 euros HDD price (VAT included) HAS5300-8T – 329.40 euros Dimensions / Weight 88 x 482 x 724 mm / 14.5 Kg Technical characteristics Number of drive bays 12 Drive type 3.5″ / 2.5″ / SATA3 Supported RAID levels RAID F1 / Basic / JBOD / RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 6 / 10 CPU Intel Xeon D-1541 / 2.1 GHz (up to 2, 7 GHz) / 8 Core RAM / RAM max. 16 GByte DDR4 ECC / 128 GByte Int. number / type network 4x Gigabit Ethernet + 2x 10 GbE (10GbaseT) Supported network protocols SMB / AFP / NFS / FTP / WebDAV / CalDAV / iSCSI / Telnet / SSH / SNMP / VPN (PPTP, OpenVPN, L2TP) USB / eSATA ports 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 / no Other interfaces 1x Expansion port SAS / RS-232 9 pin + 2x PCI Express x8 3.0 Power 2x 500 W redundant hot-swap iSCSI support yes / Maximum number of iSCSI Targets: 256 / Maximum number of iSCSI LUNs: 512 Support virtualization yes / VMware vSphere 6.5 / Microsoft Hyper-V / Citrix / OpenStack Microsoft AD support yes Cooling 4 hot-swap / (80 x 80 x 32 mm)