Storage vendor Synology this morning announced the availability of two additions to its rack-mounted storage appliance lineup: the 1U RS816, which has room for four internal disks, and the 2U RS3617xs, with 12 internal drive bays and up to 36 disks with additional enclosures.

Synology

Synology

Synology

Synology

Synology

Synology

Synology

Synology

Although it has been a while since we last did a review , Synology’s network attached storage (NAS) devices are pretty popular with Ars staff and readers. But these new rackmount offerings are meant for data centers, not home server closets—not unless you’re the kind of person with a 19" rack at home (and we know you folks are out there!). The 1U RS816 has a Marvel Armada dual-core CPU and a gigabyte of RAM on board, as well as a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports; the bigger RS3617xs uses a quad-core Intel Xeon E3-1230v2 CPU and comes with 4GB of ECC RAM and four gigabit Ethernet ports. The RS3617xs also has a pair of PCIe 3.0 8-lane slots which can each be filled by a 10Gbps Ethernet card.

On the low end, the RS816 lets you chop up your disks into a number of different redundancy schemes, including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, and also Synology’s proprietary Synology Hybrid RAID containerized format (which lets you mix and match different sized disks without sacrificing as much space as with standard RAID layouts). The bigger RES3617xs doesn’t support Synology Hybrid RAID, but it does let you format its disks with the next-gen btrfs file system, which carries a number of advantages over the default ext4 file system.

According to Synology, the RS816 supports a max of 2,048 connected users with 256 shared network folders and 10 iSCSI targets. The RS3617xs will support 16,000 users with 512 shared folders and 64 iSCSI targets. The RS3617xs is also certified for use as a virtualization backend with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix, and has native support for Vmware’s VAAI API.

Both appliances are available today at Synology’s site. The RS816 costs $549.99, and the RS3617xs is $2,599.99.