IT Pro Verdict
With its SFP+ ports and Annapurna SoC, the DS2015xs is a bit of an odd-ball NAS appliance. IP SAN write performance isn’t great but it has no problems with NAS operations and you won’t get dual 10GbE ports as standard for less than this
Pros
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Very good value; dual 10GbE SFP+ ports; Good NAS performer; Feature-rich DSM software
Cons
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10GbE transceivers increase price; Alpine SoC delivers poor iSCSI write performance
Synology makes a break from tradition as its DS2015xs is the first NAS appliance on the market to use an Annapurna Labs Alpine AL-514 ARM-based SoC. Netgear and Qnap have recently launched appliances with Alpine SoCs but they've gone for the lower end dual-core chips.
The AL-514 is a quad-core model turning over at 1.7GHz and supporting up to 8GB of non-ECC DDR3 memory. However, what really makes the DS2015xs unusual is the SoC has dual embedded 10GbE SFP+ ports.
Pricewise, the DS2015xs looks good value with a diskless unit hovering around the 800 ex VAT mark. A close competitor is Netgear's ReadyNAS 716 which provides dual 10GBase-T ports but it only has six bays and a diskless unit costs over 1,000 more.
Even including the additional cost of 10GbE transceivers, it still beats Netgear hands down with the Intel and Avago short-range 10GBase-SR transceivers we use in the lab costing around 120 apiece. If you have other transceiver plans, we recommend checking Synology's compatibility list as there aren't many other models on it.
Disk groups or volumes? Choose carefully as IP SAN features are different for each type
