Kathy Gibson reports from Synology Open Day in Cape Town – In an increasingly digital and AI-led business environment, organisations are more dependent than ever on their data – and the ability to store, protect and manage this data becomes an existential issue.
Mike Chen, senior sales manager at Synology, explains businesses are under pressure to find the right storage solution for their organisation’s needs.
Synology is expanding its solution offering beyond the B2C NAS (network-attached storage) space where it has traditionally played, and is bringing enterprise-level solutions to market.
The PAS Series, introduced earlier this year, is designed for high performance, low latency workloads, while the soon-to-be-launched GS Series handles distributed site system and object storage.
PAS7700 for mission-critical workloads
Chen highlights the PAS7700, a powerful new system that is optimised for mission-critical workloads.
The system includes either four 100GB Ethernet interfaces or 12 25GbE interfaces.
Adding to the impressive speed, the PAS7700 runs up to 2-million IOPS, at 30Gbps and with sub-1 millisecond latency.
“This performance puts it on par with other industry-leading enterprise storage systems,” Chen points out.
Automatic failover is ensured with the PAS7700’s active-active dual controller, which reduces downtime on storage, network and controllers.
Meanwhile, parallel active dual storage means that each drive is evenly divided between two controllers to enable access from both.
Thanks to the automatic switchover, users experience non-disruptive upgrades, Chen adds. “Application updates, firmware updates and operating system updates can all be applied without disruption to applications or data services.
“Software-defined IT failover and an always-available data pathway ensure the availability of data services, and users experience no downtime.”
Scale out with the GS Series
For scale-out and file storage, Synology offers the GS Series, which can scale to an impressive 45 petabytes of storage.
“This system is designed to manage massive amounts of unstructured data,” Chen explains. “These could include archives and backups, data lakes and analytics, media and content, and large-scale file sharing.’
Synology and other storage vendors have long mastered the provision is scale-up designs, where storage capacity grows as customers add new data.
Now, scale-out architecture combines multiple hosts into a single cluster. “Each node increases storage capacity, plus computing and performance,” Chen points out. “And the cluster delivers end-to-end redundancy to eliminate a single point of failure.
This means that is a host fails or is taken down to be upgraded, the rest of the cluster continues to work.
“The GS Series enables continuous availability,” says Chen. “From performance to scale, it is built for enterprise growth.”
Improved security
Chen describes the goal of what the GS Series provides as being secure, efficient and flexible.
“Security is the foundation, providing essential cybersecurity capabilities for the enterprise. This security is at the core of Synology’s DNA.”
Indeed, Chen points out that Synology can boast of responding to critical vulnerabilities in less the 24 hours. And, over the last 12 months, the company has shipped an impressive security fixes.
AI-assisted security is enabled at every stage of the lifecycle, from design to development, verification and maintenance.
Greater efficiency
“As data continues to grow, enterprises need to maximise their storage efficiency and get more value,” Chen says. “Efficiency is no longer optional.”
The need for greater efficiency is being exacerbated by the global component shortage that is seeing NAND prices up more than 200%, with lead times to delivering up to 52 weeks.
Helping customers to maximise efficiency, Synology enables data deduplication and data compression. “Using both duplication and compression saves space and increases performance,” says Chen. “And this technology is exclusively available from Synology.”
Tiering is another technology that improves efficiency, allowing admins to move data based on defined priorities. With Synology, tiering can be across SSDs to HDDs on the same NAS, or across Synology systems.
And into the cloud
C2 Cloud Storage is Synology’s cloud offering, and has enjoyed traction with customers.
The services currently stores more the 315 Petabytes of data, with more than 76 000 storage system backed up.
In excess of 2 000 organisations are signed up, with more than 10TB of subscribed storage. And approximately 3 900 sites are synching data with Hybrid Share.
“Synology offers unified cloud storage for diverse scenarios, in one subscription,” Chen concludes.
Who is Synology?
Synology was founded in 2000 as a storage company that has since evolved into a complete infrastructure solutions company for home and SMB – and is now evolving into the enterprise space.
Headquartered in Taiwan, the company employs more than 1 000 people, more than 80% of them engineers.
To date, 14-million Synology units have been shipped, protecting more than 400 exabytes of data. Customers include more than half of the Fortune 500 companies.
Chen describes Synology’s ethos as resting on four pillars: data storage and management; business protection; data protection; and video surveillance.
“The product portfolio meets all customers’ needs,” he says. “It includes all-flash, dual-controller, petabyte level and general purpose solutions, ranging from 1Tb all the way to 5 Petabytes.
“And all our hardware is powered by Synology’s DSM (Disk Station Manager) , which is the fourth biggest operating system in the world.