Synology is best known as a network-attached storage (NAS) provider in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and even consumer space, but it has plans to get into the enterprise.
It’s a specialist in hard disk drive (HDD)-based NAS boxes – although it has an SSD range, the FS – but the supplier has plans to elbow its way among the likes of Dell, HPE and NetApp in the cold data space.
“SMEs remain our target market but sales to large enterprises form one-third of our revenue today,” said Ivan Lebowski, sales team lead for Synology in France and Africa. “Among our customers are Unesco, which backs up 70 VMs at its sites with our products.
“We also have numerous hospital customers in France that prefer to deploy additional NAS on-site because they are cheaper, easy to use and more compliant than cloud storage.”
Synology NAS boxes comprise: DiskStation (DS) boxes that hold up to 12 drives for the desktop; RackStation (RS) arrays that go from 1U to 4U and contain between four and 16 HDDs, and up to 320TB; a 4U rack, the 4U High Density (HD) 6500 that takes up to 60 HDDs and goes to 1.2PB raw; and the FlashStation (FS) that runs up to 24 flash drives and is aimed at databases, virtual machines (VMs) or online transaction processing (OLTP).
The products use two redundant connections and disks are deployed in RAID to protect against outages. According to the controller, it’s possible to extend the array by up to four extra shelves. The HD6500 can go up to 6PB in raw capacity like this and 4PB useable after factoring in RAID redundancy.
“The HD6500 is a big success in hospitals, where it is used primarily for medical imagery, but also in video production environments for video archiving,” said Lebowski.
The arrays provide NAS file storage shared via Ethernet. Some models can be used in block mode via Fibre Channel or iSCSI, typically in backup use cases for VMware or Hyper-V VMs.
Synology plans to launch models that will take SSD next year. “We already use NVMe SSDs in our professional products, but only as cache,” said Lebowski.
“In 2025, they’ll be available as storage capacity. That’s in answer to enterprises that need more throughput,” he said, suggesting uses will extend beyond storage of cold data.
Apps for different use cases
Cold data is data that might be written intensively, but accessed occasionally. It might be backup, surveillance video, or even business documents created regularly but to which access is not needed routinely.
Synology makes its products available with different applications ready to use for different use cases. So, you have, for example, Active Backup for backup on-site or in the cloud, Snapshot Replication to create secondary copies held remotely, and Surveillance Station, which allows viewing and analysis of surveillance camera footage.
“A big strength of Synology is the DSM [Disk Station Manager] UI,” said Lebowski.
Surveillance Station, for example, is deployable from an app store and can label sequences in video where it detects movement. That usage is unlimited as long as the customer uses cameras sold by Synology or by paying a licence of €50 per camera.
“We offer NAS with more powerful controllers, called DVA, that add deeper analysis functionality to Surveillance Station and that can recognise faces and car number plates,” said Lebowski, who mentioned one of its customers, QPark, that uses those features.
Meanwhile, Active Backup has recently come into line with other backup products. That means the capability to define immutable copies that can’t be changed or deleted before a specified date. In case production servers become unavailable, the Synology array can run up to seven virtual machines. Active Backup is designed to restore those VMs to production VMware or Hyper-V servers.
The DSM interface also has Active Insight, which allows the customer to see whether all array firmware is up to date. If not, it’s possible to download the most recent version. Active Insight also alerts the customer to access attempts from unexpected locations, at unexpected times or even from users on Active Directory that don’t usually access the NAS.