Synology’s FlashStation FS3017 NAS Designed For Business With Big Storage Speed Demands

If you’re in charge of a small or medium business that relies on super-fast storage, then Synology’s latest NAS should be of interest. The first in its series, the FlashStation FS3017 is designed to offer absurd I/O speeds thanks to its focus on flash storage – we’re talking 200,000 IOPS kind of fast.

Clearly, Synology’s FlashStation series means business, and it’s not just because of its use of SSDs. While no SSDs are included in this $9,999 NAS, all other hardware is. That includes dual 6-core Intel Xeon processors, 64GB of ECC DDR4 (expandable up to 512GB), and dual 10GBase-T ports. Optional add-ons will enable 10GbE, 25GbE, and also 40GbE networking.

To hit the promised 200,000K IOPS, RDMA (remote direct memory access) mode will need to be used. This means that the OS’ storage layer is bypassed so that speeds are kept as fast as possible. Further, the data isn’t just made fast, it’s also made secure, thanks to Synology’s built-in RAID functions. When a heavy-used drive is found to be in a less-than-ideal state, it can simply be swapped out. Because we’re dealing with solid-state storage, we’d imagine the entire rebuilding process could happen in just two hours, based on ~1TB models (assuming constant 300MB/s writes + data validation).

The FlashStation FS3017 is designed to work with a variety of software, all stemming from Synology’s DiskStation Manager, aka: DSM. Supported software solutions include Citrix, VMware, Hyper-V, and OpenStack.

As mentioned above, the FS3017 is priced at $9,999, so it’s not a solution for most small businesses, although that’d largely depend on the type of business. We might see these used more often in medium businesses, as $10K for this NAS is just the start of the infrastructure. Networking equipment and the SSDs themselves would add onto it.

But what a solution. We can dig it.