 Tom here from One Systems and we're going to talk about the Synology Flashdation FS3410. I've been running this unit for just about 60 days. We've thrown everything at it, done a lot of demos, played with the virtual machines on it, used it as a storage target for hypervisors, and it worked fine. No flaws, no problems. So too long didn't watch this thing. Works great. But let's get a couple things disclosed besides that out of the way before you go further in this video to know that this is a demo unit that I have to send back. So this is not a sponsored review. Why do we have demo units? Well, we have done and continue to do lots of consulting with businesses on Synology and solutions we've provided with it. And we're also a Synology reseller. So we get these demo units so we can one, review them and share them with you, the audience, and two, test them out ourselves. So we can test out different scenarios because spec sheets only get you so far. Sometimes I want to understand better how these things work, how they perform under load. If there's any scenarios I can create that cause me a problem. And none of the scenarios we created caused any problems. We were actually rather happy with the performance. Yes, we'll talk about some of the performance numbers. And more importantly, we'll even talk about a fun demo I set up where we show you how you can take active backup and restore it right back to a virtual machine and how fast it does it. Because I think that says more than some spec sheets. So you can talk about that as a scenario. And that's what's kind of fun with these technologies is having these units to test these out before we deploy them into a client solution. So we did all this in our lab. Now this unit is more targeted towards the enterprise small business market, the price point on it as it's going for roughly here in January of 2023 and hopefully in the future going for less is just under $7,000. Now we'll talk about where this fits in a strategy lineup. But an all flash storage array for this price I think is rather reasonable. Now that is a price without any drives, by the way, the drive prices depending on what future you're in are kind of a variable where drives do get cheaper over time. But sometimes supply chain pushes them up temporarily. And I want to address that issue as well. This is one of those things that I just need to get out of the way. Yes, it does require the supported by Synology list of drives as in a narrower list. This is something that I know causes a heated debate right away with people going, Synology is just doing a cash grab and forcing me to use these particular devices. And they want me to buy them only from Synology and only Synology certified drives. That's not exactly true. What's going on is and this happens more so in the enterprise space, when companies build a storage server, they want to build it in a way that it has a predictable performance profile. And if there's any firmware issues, they want to have a predictable way they can update the firmware. If you load any drives you want in one of these enterprise targeted systems, you will get a inconsistent performance profile and you may or may not be able to update the firmware. And I don't think or see a future where Synology starts doing this with either smaller units that are more targeted for these small office or home users. This is something that I see them wanting to do with these particular units because people ask and this is not a problem or has not been a problem in any of the consulting we've done in the enterprise space with Synologies. They usually want a predicted performance in a predicted lifetime and good support. And so I don't see this as a huge deal, but it's something I want to make sure you're aware of because that could be enough to say that's the decision point. And I want to make sure that it's very clear front of whether or not you want to buy one of these units is not being able to load up any random drives you want. So those being out of the way, let's dive into the details of this and talk about that demo of how fast it can do a restore to a virtual machine. Now, the Synology FS series stands for their Flash series. It is designed as it says for latency sensitive workloads. Now you have the FS6400, which in January 2023, roughly $12,000 for that unit, depending on where you buy it from. But it's the same form factor to you 24 Bay, really high performance at 240,000 4k random rate IOPS versus the FS3410 coming in at 129,000 iskasi 4k random rate IOPS, about half the performance just about half the price in there. So this may be better for people who want to buy two units. So they have some more resiliency, because the Synology HA system, which I've done demos on works really, really well, where you can take two similar units and go ahead and replicate them and create a failover situation. So if you don't need as much performance but would rather have that extra resiliency, I think the FS3410 is a good bet. Now as far as form factor, it is a 2U unit here with 24 drives all flash. But let's jump right over here to the specs. And we see that we have an eight core 2.1 base and 2.7 gigahertz turbo until Xeon D 1541. Now the system ships with 16 gig of RAM, our demo unit does have 32 gig outside of that. It's pretty much the same here. We have a maximum capacity of 128 gigs. And as we scroll down here, we'll look at the LAN ports and connectivity. The RGA 45 one gig LAN ports, we have four of them. And this is a nice feature of having two 10 gig ports built in. So you need 10 gig RGA 45 comes with it, you don't have to get an adding card. We still went with a adding card and by which we you have two gen three by eight PCIe expansion slots. And we filled one of those with a 25 gig card just because why not do it all at 25 gig. Now something they have down here is the noise testing that was conductive analogy fully installed say the SSDs, they have some of that information on here. Yes, it's not a quiet system for anyone wondering, it does make a decent amount of noise, but it's a rack mounted system. I don't think it's something that you really want on your desk next to you. Now one nice thing about Synology hardware is they do make the drive slide in really easy. It's not a challenge getting these in and out nice good precision fit and feel doesn't have a sloppiness to it at all. When we take a look inside the case here, I think sounds you does a good job of keeping everything really clean. The controller cards, the wiring, the routing of the cables, everything is really nice inside. I don't see anything that's like blocking any type of airflow. It's not messy or a lot of cables everywhere. I don't know. It doesn't seem like it matters much, but it kind of does matter to me that you have a nice clean design inside. If there's anything you need to service such as putting more memory in the power supply slide out really easy. 550 Watts. And as I said, they can be done while the machine is on of note the way the little lever works, it keeps you from pulling it out while there's a power cord in it. The fans come out really easy, really simple without any tools to slide these in or out. They're not marked so any one of them could go in any other slot. And when the system is installed, you simply slide it out. And there's two little buttons you press to remove a panel. No screws, removing panels either to service a fan. And this can be done, of course, with the system on. Let's talk about the drive layouts here. This system does have 24 drives in it. They are the Synology specific drives, as I mentioned in the beginning, you can click on any one of these and see the model, which is a Synology SAT 5210-48G SSD. We can see its status, the estimated lifespan, and we can see the firmware version. And this is one of the things that I mentioned before, when you have these specific drives, if there's a firmware update, because it's all done by Synology from the system, the software and the drives, they're able to push those firmware dates in here as needed. Now, as if it wasn't easy enough to see where the drives are, and they'll show red, or if there's an error here, you can click on which one. But maybe you need to locate which drive. And if we want to click on lucky number 13 here, we can click locate drive. This is also handy for not having to counter, miscount something when you're kind of busy, just replace the blinking one, find the blinking one. And that's the one you should pop out and replace. This is all done and set up with the Synology RAID F1. RAID F1 is the Synology setup for RAID arrays that are using flash storage. This is essentially a customized version of Linux MDM RAID, because underneath the hood, it runs Linux, but it has extra features in there that are designed by Synology to help with ware leveling and keep the best performance out of solid state drives. Now, one of the other things I want to mention is Synology does offer, and I would recommend using ButterFS or BTRFS. I prefer to say ButterFS. ButterFS is something Synology overlays on top. They use their own controllers and RAID control via Linux, but then put ButterFS as a file system on top of it. So ButterFS, even though it does have the ability to directly control the drives, Synology optimizes things by designing their own custom RAID and essentially building that all on top of Linux. But then on top of that layering ButterFS, so you get all the extended file system features of ButterFS, such as snapshotting and replication. So those features are all supported at the file system level and the hardware level, the physical drives via the controllers are controlled by the Synology Linux kernel, essentially. So it's not like ButterFS is directly controlling the drives. That is one of those things I've actually talked to their engineers about, and we found it to be the best balance of them having really solid controls inside their system. And then getting all those extra cool features you get with ButterFS and the enhancements you get with that as a file system, because ButterFS is also a copy unwrite file system with a lot of good resiliency in terms of protecting your data. Now let's talk a little bit about performance and benchmarks and don't breathe too much into benchmarks because the old saying is there's lies, damn lies, and then there's benchmarks. They can sometimes skew people into thinking something differently about a product or they can be crafted in a way to give you statistics in a way that are often unrealistic. For example, I did, and this is one of those spec sheet type things, I wanted to see if I could reach the specs that Synology had. Now we're running XCPNG on a Ryzen system. This Ryzen system has a 25 gig card in it. It is also connected to the Synology via iSCSI at 25 gigs. And we were actually able to achieve the random read of 129,000 IOPS on here with a single VM. And then we can go down here and we can see the random write of 122,000. Now, as I said, I didn't adjust the MTU or really fine tune this in any way. I just was able to get with a single VM performance just about the spec that Synology had on their spec sheet of their 4k random IOPS. So that's a pretty impressive number. That being said, how many people are going to buy this to run a single VM? Very unlikely scenario. So we took two VMs running the same benchmark at exactly the same time. My question was, would the performance be halved? That was what the question I had when it came to random read. Yeah, we were random reading different files from two different VMs at the same time. So we went from 129,000 to 61,000. So it did halve it there. But the random write surprisingly didn't go quite to half. So we have 122,000, but then we were able to get 74,000 running dual systems. And we go here like to the sequential, which gave us 164,000 IOPS. But then sequential on both of these was able to do a 122,000. I'll let you click through this link. It's in the description. If you want to stare at and draw any other conclusions, but that's the setup we use is essentially running a single VM or running two VMs that are doing exactly the same thing at the same time, which is running the pharaonics benchmarks. All right, now let's talk about active backup and a test that's pretty realistic here. We have active backup setup and we have it set up as the physical server. I have a link down in there for Synology's tutorial on exactly how this works and how to set it up. They've got a step by step for how to set up a physical server and then do this restore process. But we're going to run through it real quick here to show you the demo for how it looks. We have my Windows server. And then we're going to pull up the Synology active backup. I'm just remote it in. She will do this. It's not doing anything at the moment. So we'll pull up. It says it's idle, view backup status. And let's go ahead and click a backup. Now that we've done some changes to the system. So we're going to go here. We'll go to our task list. It's the only one in here. We want to back up this system. It's going to back up relatively fast because it's a fast system, not just the Synology, but the system is attached to. So preparing for backup. It's found about 354 megs and changes. All right, backup complete. That happened all in real time. I didn't edit that. That's just right to the point. The backup's done. Now what we want to do is shut off this server. We've got the backup and we want to power it down. So we'll shut this down. Other whatever. All right, that system's now off. Let's go ahead and go to our backups. Go here and we want to do a restore process. And you can see I've run this several times. So let's go ahead and choose this last one we did because we have that U2 demo folder. And we want to do an instant restore. So we go next. And what do we want to restore it to? Here's great. This is where it's located. We'll call this demo, it demo. All right, next. Sure, it's just doing this as a false, which are fine, unmounted. Yeah, all these are perfectly fine here. It's recognizing what it needs to do to set this up. And we'll go ahead and allow all the local users access to it because it might be necessary. We won't power on recreation because I want to show you the first step in this. So we're going to hit done. And we're going to do this in real time as well. I'm not going to edit this part. I just want it to go through. It says importing 10% here, importing 100%. Now it's not ready to be powered. Oh, it is ready to be powered on. So that took all of just a few seconds in the most literal, you know, few seconds, I can say here, that's now we can actually go through, prepare it and turn it on. So it's not quite done. Now we have to do the first boot. And for that, we're also going to do an action or connect because we want to watch it boot for the first time. Once again, I'm doing it all this in real time. I'm not editing any of this out. So you can go through the entire process with me for how fast this is. Because I think this is much more realistic than a benchmark and saying like, Oh, it's going to restore fast to an instant restore off of the active backup to the virtual machine manager and Synology. But watching it do it, I think it's just way better. Now it also takes the time to load the Synology drivers. Those were injected in here for the boot. So let's go ahead and watch it boot. We're getting close, getting ready. And we're almost there. Now this is going to be more a factor. Well, first of what's loaded in Windows, what does they have to for startup? It did a boot and restart, that's normal. And now it's going to do the full boot because it was injecting all those drivers, as I said, so Synology can boot in a virtual machine with this Windows system. A few minutes more here. And we're ready. I can log right back into the system. Now that part was edited. This only jump I did was to edit how long it took me to type in that password and how many times I got it wrong. I will do a little bit of editing with that. Now, because the backup was done while it's online, it will give the error that there was a unplanned shutdown, but we can go in here and just put some comments in here. Nonetheless, my point for this was the fact that it does it that fast. I think that's an impressive demo to me. And I like this demo because it's very representative of something you might do in the real world. You may be using active backup to back up a physical server that physical server may go down and you go, well, I can restore it, but I probably need to restore it immediately. And right now, and this would give you that ability. Now something worth noting after you do a restore, the system will automatically connect the active backup system to the active backup for business and create a new entry. So we have the entry here, which has a successful backup and you'll see the new one by it has no successful backups. This is something that I think it's handled okay, but I wish analogy labeled it a little bit better where at least you know, and you'll notice that it says no backup yet. So you know it's just a new one created, but I kind of wish they'd say like, Hey, do you want this to also have active backup on it? But I guess maybe you do. But now you're backing up to the same analogy that it's running on. Nonetheless, just a little thing to take into consideration, you will want to update your task list and maybe get rid of if that server is not coming back to life and delete this system, because then you can run these backups off this one. So you can actually run this task and say do a backup again here. And then if you need to restore back to physical hardware to move it back over, you'd be able to do that too. So my final thoughts on a Synology FS 3410. I think this is a great solution in a Synology lineup. And it's like I said, being in a video, it's worked great. We didn't have any problems with it. That being said, it does come with a five year warranty. So as this is targeted more towards the business class, people want good warranties on there. That is something Synology is offering on here. Now the active backup demo, one of the reasons I chose that, and I want to reiterate this, and this is a big selling point for Synology, not just their software, but specifically active backup, it does not require licensing. I know they're not the only company that can do these instant restores to the virtual machines and have your system back up and running in a matter of minutes. That's a great feature. But that feature usually comes as a separate software to may buy and has a big expense attached to it with the Synology hardware. And maybe you have five, six, 10 servers that you're backing up to this and you would like to instant restore any of them. Well, that doesn't have any actual license fees attached to it. And I think it's a compelling offer because so many businesses, and we deal a lot with this internal IT teams, they're getting what they feel, nickel and dime subscription to death on all these different things. Everything has some type of subscription, as opposed to can I just buy some hardware that doesn't come with some incredible subscription that only keeps going up in price every time they renew it. Synology has done a good job of offering a lot of features provided you by their hardware that you get for free with the software. There are, of course, some exceptions. You know, Synology Surveillance Station is an easy example of yes, they do charge single one time, not subscription fees for their cameras, but this is something Synology does well. They put a lot of power in the hands of internal teams that want to use it without having to try to sell your boss on the fact that, hey, can I buy this thing that's going to need a subscription and the subscription is only so long and it keeps going up over time. A little bit harder to predict your cost when you do something like that. That being said, love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts and comments down below or head over to my forums for a more in depth discussion. Or if you'd like to hire us for some Synology Consulting, hit our website and click that hire us button. We'd love to help you with Synology product, whether it's a solution you already bought or you'd like to buy it. Through us, let us know. Always live hearing from you and thanks.