 Tommy here from Lawrence Systems and Synology sent me, but I do have to send it back. So fold disclosure there a SA3200D This is a high availability in a passive active mode dual controller Synology now we use Synology for a lot of small businesses mostly like the 918 series are really popular right now here in August of 2020 and This is something a little bit higher end of course comes a little bit higher end sticker But it's got a lot of impressive features, and I think it's a really affordable ha system So I was excited to review it, you know kind of evaluate it now I don't have any of these in production deployment. It's a pretty new system Matter of fact, I was on a waiting list to get this system here now I actually have as well and we're gonna talk about this one of the modules out well This is the one that went bad and these demo units are sent back and forth quite a bit And they do go through and thoroughly test them But now this one died during my testing So I thought that makes the review that much more interesting while I was you know pulling the power supply Well pulling the plugs out of the power supplies This one didn't come back on after I did one of my resets I thought that was you know a little bit interesting because it adds a little bit of intrigue of what happens when it crashes How do you rebuild them because it comes basically configured and I wanted to see how you rebuilt So we're gonna cover that process. So to me that's just kind of bonus material I believe it probably has more to do with the fact that it's a demo unit that gets sent back out a lot They have not I did as I actually spent some time talking with the technicians actually just inquiring about these devices No one and nowhere I could find that they have any high rates of failure And they do come with a five-year warranty and the next day aired right away another module out there And by the way, I was able to keep testing everything on a single module and everything worked perfectly fine So even with the module out No issues pop the module in and away we went it restored and I'll cover that process in a little bit Before we jump into all those details Let's first feel like to learn more about me and my company head over to laurance systems.com If you like to hire short project, there's a hires button right at the top If you like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has There is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel Check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out Well, randomly, so check back frequently And finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video And other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content Now I'm gonna start here at the product page for it SA3200D is the module is a system you see right in front of me And it does look exactly like at least from the appearance I don't have one of these the uc3200 and it caused a little bit of confusion But I figured hey, I'll clarify this real quick the uc3200 is an active active ip sand And it only runs iSCSI not the full sonology software. So this is a very specific Very reliable high availability iSCSI services box. That's the uc3200 and on this the SA3200D Runs the sonology distation software, but is also high availability But it's in an active passive now active active is for absolutely seamless failovers where you don't even notice Active passive there's a delay between the time the device fails and the time It recovers so we're going to cover when I show how the failover works in this I didn't have a problem with the failover including running VMs on it But of course they pause for the moments in time it takes for it to go from active to passive It switches rather quick But I'll at least mention that that it's not an active active and they do make an active active But it doesn't run the full distation So a little bit of clarification right there and also I don't have these but it does support up to two Rxd 12 19 sass expansion units. So when you see these in a stack you can actually take the uc 3200 or The sa 3200 and add on those extra ones for more drive So when you see somewhere wrong in a marketing where it says it can have even more support than the bays that are in front of this Well, that's what they're talking about there. So dual storage controllers shared storage design each controller fully talks to All the storage so that's not a problem in these devices So even though it's active passive, it doesn't actually go through an entire boot up or looking at the drives one One module at a time can control the drives, but both modules are always in sync with the drives So doing the failover the VMs did not crash, which is actually really cool for that Up to 36 drives and this is why I said, you know talked about supporting expansion modules on there Because well, you're not going to fit 36 drives on the one in front of me Scales up with you and then they show this then they show the modules in the back and we'll cover those in a little bit More detail but There is the mini sass port like you see right here and then we have the 10 gig port So we have a 10 gig port here a 10 gig port here and two one gig ports But there is technically only one 10 gig per module So you can't team those together to be 20 in case you're wondering because these modules have to be independent of each other processors the Intel Xeon D 1521 that does have four ddr4 slots comes with eight gigs ram That is how these were shipped to us as well Modulized cooling dual fan modules per controller. We'll cover that when I show them taken apart Does use a satadom now the satadom is interesting because it's Storing the dsm on a satadom not on the drives on the system And so that covers when you're setting it up You don't have to worry about loading to the drives that are in here You can configure it and it loads at least the dsm software to the satadom And it's still redundant because it's on both controllers and anything you do to one controller Automatically happens on the other one and of course you have all the great sonology I've done a review on the active backup for business Software and talked about that and that's once again all the bells and whistles you get with the sonology Distation manager do come with this as well So if you want to run that not only can you run it on here? But you get to run it in a mode of active passive and if there's ever a failure it still can keep on going So this does you know cover the high reliability on theirs What else do we have the five-year warranty sonology replacement services? And as I said the module failed and I have a feeling this really has to do with The fact that these are demo units and these get shipped quite a bit reboxed Now this thing was an impeccably clean when I got it The tiniest little thing I could find is a little bend here But like I said, this is what gets sent out to reviewers. They send it back to sonology They clean it up format it blank it make sure it all works send it back out to the next person review I have been on the waiting list. I believe this was mentioned to me in december of 2019 right around there And it took that long before they got one out to me, which was all the way here at towards the end of july In 2020 so I know it's been through a lot of hands for demos if you look around for reviews You'll see other sites that reviewed these already So that being said after so many people reviewing it taking it apart and looking at it That seems to up the likelihood that something will happen And it did in this unit right here failed no big deal They overnighted me another one and that process was really really easy And the fact is I could see keep continuing at least my testing other than the failover testing part On a single module that worked perfectly fine And I got to go through the whole processor and we'll cover that in the software part Showing you what happens when it loses a module and can't detect it anymore So as far as the system goes itself, we looked at all the specs and we looked at all the details Let's actually take it apart a little bit I'm not going to bother about pulling the lid off this because the only thing you're exposing is the modules that come out So I'm going to spin around and show you how those modules come out. It's actually really simple So we'll start here on the back. We have these little screw modules right here And they lever out so we can do this And away we go and then the units just slide out like this pretty straightforward And they have a really nice feel build quality. They go in real smooth and this lever part puts them back in And then we just tighten them back up so no one can slide them out now The modules are not distinct to the ports. We do have it labeled It's kind of written small there but a and b and you can sweep she's back and forth It really doesn't matter when the system comes up. It makes no difference to them So there's not one labeled for one port or the other hot swap power supplies we have These little power supplies in there and they are 500 watt modules they come out really easy once again their hot swap as well Now I did confirm with this analogy people These are hot swappable that they can be taken in and out of service while it's on But they prefer you not do it unless you really really have to On the I only say that because what happens is if you Turn these on and off and slide them in and out quite a few times You end up potentially scarring the modules in there and obviously if a lot of people do that in a demo So I'm positive a lot of people have you could end up messing up the ends on there Now it's something you can do and if you're dealing with this in a production environment It's not something you're doing all the time. So it's only on a you know emergency as needed basis So it's rare, but on the demo units. I've managed to spend on quite a few times I don't admit that may have led to the problems we had with the one module in this Now to take a closer look at the modules themselves These lids just snap on and off that are on there. So that parts tool list and the fans Then they're quite well dual fans So one on each side independently spinning of each other edge connectors that go right into the base there And they firmly fit in really easy have a little arrow on them So, you know, you got the airflow right So these are easy to swap slide a module out if a fan were to go bad Well, we have two fans on each side and away we go airflow is nice and straight through the system The modules on the end here. We have the SATA DOM over here and then we have The edge connectors themselves They are small, but I don't see any issues in the edge connectors of causing any type of problem They didn't feel like I'm going to bend them or anything like that when I put it in This fits so snugly in there and smoothly when it goes in that the build quality didn't make me worry that I was going to break it When I was inserting the module and lifting the lever up So that made me really happy like overall it feels really good one minor complaint but this is me and What do you see on the back here is that little nine pin serial The only reason I'm complaining about it is probably a dumb reason the nine pin serial on here I was hoping would provide me some diagnostic data to the module that wasn't working because it did power cycle on and off briefly That's this one right here and the nine pin does nothing No, the nine pin doesn't do anything on this broken module, but the nine pin does work on the other ones for bringing you to a login prompt So it is redirecting the output to those But to me a nine pin serial is odd. I think it can odd choice to put on there Maybe it's just because I know there's still a lot of it out there even in the enterprise market But I do kind of prefer the standard usb so I can plug it directly in But I've been in business for a while So of course I have those nine pins laying around in a box And I was able to go get one out of the box that we don't access very often For the occasion when we have to find something that requires the old style nine pin minor complaint But hey whatever at least bring it up that yes that is actually a working serial port on the back Well, it doesn't have any functional usage only for diagnostic use now Let's talk about the drives themselves and spin it around So the drives here are really easy to slide out and once again Really smooth so no complaints here as far as like the build quality on them And they have a little lock so you can't press the button and get them out so you just snap that over Now they are not though tool lists So you do got to put some screws in these not a huge deal I do like tool lists because when you're setting up a whole lot of drives It's quick and easy, but they give you all the screws you need to put it in there Now this does have holes for three and a half and two and a half inch drives So no big deal putting them in build quality wise though I would say these are really solid when you slide the drive out you're not feeling like it'll There's very little play and once you get them in there No play at all. This is really lined up well so it inserts no problem Lock drives in there Works perfectly fine. All right. So now let's get to the software perks That's where the fun begins actually seeing how the failover works seeing if the VMs work which spoiler If you don't want to go any further. Yes, they work. It fails over perfectly fine Yes, it does pause and we'll cover those details in a second of how the active passive work in here So let's get started with that So when the system starts up, it's a little bit noisy as it goes through the fan test It's about 97 and calms down in about the 80s for normal runtime Obviously that's going to vary with load and heat and how your server room is set up So obviously not quite enough that you want it on the desk next to you, but not unreasonably loud either All right, and we have the Synology all set up configured We've already loaded the DSM software. I kind of skipped that part But it's not anything different than the other Synologies that we've set up So you run through it comes blank it downloads the latest version of the distation manager But one extra step they add in there is this Synology high availability plugin Now this one of the questions it's going to ask you on setup is what is the IP address for high availability? You have to pick a static IP address we chose 192.1683.215 So choosing that address and now let's go over to how it's actually plugged in with the two 10 gig ports On this unify switch. We have these device names HA19 AO and HA20150 and The respective IP addresses of 192.1683.215 and the other one is 3.163 Now the active controller always gets the static address The passive controller is set to DHCP and it just grabs an address from my network So when we switch these controllers because it's not flipping the MAC addresses It's only flipping the IP address assignments Now there's a couple ways this can happen one we can do switch over and we'll do that real quick here You're about to perform a switch over to the passive server and all tasks will be cancelled and running So I would like to proceed with the action and cancel all running tasks If you have some active thing you're doing like a running task it may cancel that But this is the controlled version where we said Initiate the switch over now the two devices stay in sync with each other by a transparent backplane Essentially that is between the active and passive controller So they don't need any of the network interfaces to be plugged in for the two Devices to talk to each other. That's how they stay in sync So anytime you load a feature set something up inside of the active controller the passive controller Always immediately gets those settings. Like I said, even if the network Is not talking because the back planes talk to each other and they're both talking to the drives at the same time Now this Switches over relatively fast. This is like the controlled one takes about 16 17 seconds For it to do the switch over now this part takes a little bit longer probably about 20 seconds Before this but if you were to ping it and see when the availability of the devices It's about 14 seconds now the failover itself like a catastrophic failover or just unplugging the network cable That takes pretty consistently between 49 and 50 seconds. I timed when doing those So if we were to just go unplug the system It does take a little bit longer because it's looking for the network Back and forth to be able to find it and the same thing when the controller failed It paused a little bit longer while that controller was failed and then it switches back over Now the way we have this configured is as a storage device for my zen server So a little bit expanded view of the lab We have xcp and g running on the super micro super storage server that i had reviewed previously I can leave a link to that particular review if you're interested in this server But the synology nfs share and synology ice kz So I have the synology as and this is a pretty popular use case for this high availability system Set up as a storage target for virtual machines. It'll also work with vm where it also works with citrix I just happen to like xcp and g so i'm running that on here And I have one share set up as nfs and one share is ice cozy and when you Go here to the high availability You can actually choose high availability to be applied to the ice cozy target any nfs target And you choose which network interfaces you want the high availability to be talking on and connect to and for me That's land three Which is the 10 gig port on me So this each as I stated and want to show on the hardware each one of these has the 10 gig port Now it does work for smb. We're not going to test the smb I did test the share it does work It does the same thing it pauses if there's a failure of the network interface for while you're waiting up to 50 seconds For the fail over what I found more interesting was when it fails over as ice cozy and nfs As a target it also Is able to keep the vm's up and running so there's not any data loss even though there's a connection loss zen Handles that quite well and I don't have an esxi system handy But my understanding is it will handle it as well where even though it loses hard drive connectivity Essentially hit storage controller temporarily it will pause the reads and writes for the vm's it'll queue those up and then Drop them on the machine once it gets Connectivity restored One more comment before we do the demo real quick here is I also tested this I took the debian and ran the Open benchmarking which is the foronix tool and I wanted to see if there was any significant difference between ice cousin nfs Running on the synology system and I didn't find any significant difference between them They were pretty neck and neck and I know maybe someone will point out that if you use certain block sizes Or do more extensive testing there might be some differences But I didn't want to spend too much time on x it goes out of scope of this particular review But if there's some other if I have time with this device and there's some other testing That maybe some comments or suggestions are on hey, I'll run those tests as well But At least for the brief here you can see there's slight differences where nfs was faster on a couple instances Then ice cousin was a little bit better here. But like I said, these are not like night and day numbers All right, let's drop that right here and move on to this One little last note before we do the other failover test is Please note that the ip address is flip flop on these as well So when these two devices and it statically assigns this one because it's not changing the mac address on here It gets a different ip address for the passive controller So it's something of note of how that works on there for the active passive All right, moving over to actually watching it fail over while it's doing something Let's make sure we got our vms fired up here I have the windows 10 and we'll kick it off to do something like a windows update Check for updates So it's doing something and then we'll go over here to Debian which is running this is running on Synology Ice Cuzzy So we'll log into this real quick I think I have some task I can get it to do Oh, cool. Let's kick off a benchmark So let's run all the tests one All right, so this is doing some disk activity. So it's rewrite and We'll see some IOPS on here. Let's see It'll take a second while it queues it up and we'll see some disk action there We'll go over here to the Synology system and open up the resource monitor We should see some load on here. So we can see it's got some disk activity There we go So we got some network not huge amount of activity, but uh disk utilization reads and writes ice cozy is Going to ramp up here a little bit so 8.5 as it rums up these tests We should get some more You know activity on there, but you know shows that the drives are in use Okay, I've actually waited a little bit so it had more disk activity But now we wanted to unplug it and instead of going over and In the other room and do it We're just going to disable it in the unify controller and turn off that port So right now we're on controller b and we're going to force it to fail over to controller a So we look over here look at the ports and port 3 is plugged into controller b So we'll go ahead and edit this port and we will switch it to disabled Apply and All right, it's provisioning changes sent All right, it's disconnected. So now We actually try to reload the page It's going to fail to reload this page because there's a moment and this is the part that takes about 50 seconds to do It's slowly switching over and right now. Let's see what our Debian system. It should see a drop as well So if we go over here, actually, we'll go to the storage controller and look at the Synology NFS The stats will end up going flat storage Synology ice cozy It can't talk to it So all the stats go flat actually for even the history for a moment while it tries to figure out what's going on and Reload the page one more time And now we're switched over to the other side Warning abnormal network and what it did it was realize this is abnormal It realized this one's connected So it automatically failed it over and highlights in orange that this isn't working Like the whole thing happens relatively fast if we go back over here and we look at the VMs running on this So we look at the disk usage still flat because it lost connectivity So it's pausing and catching up on everything there, but if you look at this system itself It's still up and running. So we didn't lose connectivity. We don't have it dying. It's still able to do A task the VMs didn't crash out. I'll look at the Debian system. It's still running the tests actually go over here to council The tests probably are all over the place deviation of 51 percent The deviation in the testing is basically going well, we lost connectivity for a little while So we have this wide variant of we were getting results and then all of a sudden we got no results for an active passive system I'm going to say this is pretty reasonable On how fast this works now as far as restoring things back to normal as you know right now We can't click the switch over but we can go here Go back in here. We'll just turn the port back on hit apply It'll provision this change right back over there And as soon as it does This will come right back up and running once it realizes that the ports back plugged back in the anomaly goes away It clears and the faults are gone Now a couple other final details on this. I've done this quite a few times. I've done a switch over mainly through this I've done it Obviously just by unplugging it many times I've done it by pulling the power out out of here multiple times And we went through the failure of the module itself Which in none of these instances that I ever lose my lab systems that are running on this And now the system's back to being healthy because it realizes plugged back in So that part went really well The other thing that went well was I haven't had any corruption from the system running butterfs their Butterfs implementation that they have here on Synology seems to be quite stable quite solid And didn't run into any issues setting up in the storage manager on this and all the random unplugging of the system Trying to get it to fail did not cause any catastrophes or issues And to give you an idea if I probably go through here the logs You can see there's been quite a few times over the last few days that I just keep randomly unplugging it recover from abnormal recover from abnormal so I did not have any times where I felt those though the system was going to have any problems at all Because every time it recovered, which made me really happy You know, I was I like to put them through their paces because once someone buys something that says high availability They're probably putting it in somewhere that they need really good reliable service because I didn't have any of these in production I just been Unplugging it a lot over the last couple days to get Some baseline of it plus all the vms. I've been running I had them just looping running all kinds of demos to really put the rights on this to make sure it would Hold up to it over time and so far no issues at all granted. I've only been testing it for a few days We started testing on looks like the 29th this one. I started the testing on it and no issues Now the module that failed one side note I thought when they shipped me the new module just by putting it in it would automatically detect it and set it up It didn't all I had to do though was go to the ip address of it It says would you like to set up the distast distation manager on this? You said yes It says downloading the software once it downloaded it started talking to the other controller and got all of its settings So there's nothing I had to do inside the main UI itself I just had to say yes to downloading the software and then it configured itself Now the last thing I'm going to cover on this is price. How much does this thing cost? I a lot of people like to ask that and uh Sometimes I skip that part because I don't know just how relevant it is Because prices are what they are right now and not necessarily what they will be when you are watching this video, but To at least look at a couple places because there's more than one place it sells it Uh, if we look at all see all buying amazon options looks like it's around between 7800 8200 8300 look at somewhere like cdw. They're looking at 8206 as the advertised price And $7,000 over here at adorama. So a couple different places. Um that you can look for and find these So kind of depends on where you buy them and why I often skip price unless I know where you can buy it directly from the seller Who has a price listed on their site and Synology does not offer direct sales But does have a long list of places where you can buy their products. We're not an official reseller of Synology We are just someone who likes using their products and maybe one day will be a reseller But for the most part we are not on this list in case you're wondering We do configuration setup of these but we are not an official reseller of these devices So you can purchase them wherever you like and Take for that what you will all right. Well, that's it for my Synology review I do like the device as I stated in the beginning of video I don't have any these actively deployed out in the market But my testing with all the other Synology devices we found them very reliable This is a nice lineup and they're ha and for that price tag when you get into ha systems This is pretty reasonable because ha is pretty expensive On some of the other systems we've talked about Once you get to the really high-end ones you could be talking somewhere around 20 plus thousand dollars or some sticker prices The fact that they get this granted with no hard drives below that Mark is pretty good for an ha system even though it's still active passive active active generally costs a bit more Maybe at some point I will take a look at and review their other active active system But I think this is good because it has the full distation manager on there And it does active active passive failover and allow you to run all the great utilities that come with the distation manager Especially like this active backup for business which I have done a review on all right and thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to laurance systems.com fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time