With all that is going on in the world – many if not all events are now online. This includes the annual Synology live event, Synology 2021 AND BEYOND. The company is teasing us with some great updates and gives us some promise for 2021. They mainly covered Synology DSM 7.0, Hybrid Cloud, their new Data Backup strategy and changes to photo management.
With all that is going on in the world – many if not all events are now online. This includes the annual Synology live event, Synology 2021 AND BEYOND. The company is teasing us with some great updates and gives us some promise for 2021. They mainly covered Synology DSM 7.0, Hybrid Cloud, their new Data Backup strategy and changes to photo management.
Synology has been around for 20 years now. Primarily known for creating NAS devices with a focus on the home, small and medium offices. Though the company does offer other products such as routers and its own line of SSDs. We have been reviewing and enjoying Synology products for years with our hats off to the DSM, which is still one of the user-friendliest OS out there for NAS devices.
Synology DSM 7
Synology Disk Station Manager has been evolving steadily while integrating new features and most importantly embracing industry-standard security and performance enhancements. As an IT security professional, I was pleased to see them make mention of their Bug Bounty program.
The focus on Synology DSM 7 is to expand the Usability, Reliability, Performance, and Scalability. DSM 7 promises many new functions and enhancements coming in 202; including the addition of a smartphone-based Secure sign-in app. Also, 2FA supporting FIDO2 – This enables things like hardware security keys, Windows Hello and macOS TouchID.
One of the greatest improvements is the way DSM handles drive replacement. Until now if you wanted to upgrade a drive in your Synology, you would need to fail the drive and re-silver the array. This has always had IT managers clench a little if you are running in a single disk redundancy as this would leave the array vulnerable if any drive failed during the re-silver process. With DSM 7 they bring a new drive upgrade function that if you have an open drive bay you can put the drive that you want to upgrade to into the NAS and it will clone the drive that is to be replaced onto the new drive, reducing the risk of stressing the remaining drives. This has also been expanded to the HOT SPARE functionality by attempting to clone the failing disk to a hot spare thus reducing the wear and tear on the remaining drives during a normal re-silvering.
Additionally, Synology DSM 7 will now offer automatic repair as a feature that would be ideal for home / remote offices where the user may not have credentials to login to DSM by allowing a user to swap out drives themselves and have DSM 7 take care of the restore automatically without user interaction.
There has been much focus on enterprise and high availability functionality by increasing the speed of failover and how upgrades are handled.
Other Synology DSM7 features include:
- BTRFS Memory cache protection synchronization between active and passive servers and a significant improvement in write-back performance.
- Fiber Channel support will be available with DSM 7.
- DSM 7 will support volumes of up to 1pb and my favorite feature – GLOBAL Data deduplication!
Synology Hybrid Cloud
During the event, Synology touched on improvements to the Hybrid Share app, user authentication using C2 Directory and monitoring using Active Insight. Essentially this allows for smart caching of commonly used cloud data to the local network by Hybrid Cloud by learning commonly used files and keeping them locally available and having changes pushed back up to the cloud. This permits offline access of cloud data for those times that connectivity may not be reliable. With the addition of Organizational Units to the global administration app – this allows for administration to have end to end control of remote NAS units and control local and cloud sync resources.
Other benefits include:
- C2 Directory offers user integration with 3rd party user integration with companies like Microsoft 365 and Google Gsuite.
- Mac and PC Device administration are offered through C2.
- Active insight gives a total fleet view on a single pane of glass that lives in the cloud. In addition to making active administration easier for multiple devices, this also allows administrators to create custom alerts and reduce the amount of time they need actively watching resources.
Synology Data Backup
Synology focussed on data backup for Physical, Virtual and Cloud-based solutions using their Active Backup Suite. The suite is a Linux backup agent is in the works that will offer a bare metal backup and restoration solution that will allow recovery to hypervisors for advanced disaster recovery solutions.
They are now offering:
- A Mac OS backup solution is in the works based on AES 256 and offering compression with high-performance deduplication.
- Microsoft 365 and Google GSUITE support with support for Scheduled backup, Continuous and single instancing will be supported.
- DSM backup – now including configuration backup.
Synology Photo Management
Photo Upload (From Device), automatic thumbnail generation, share and manage are the basics of the new Synology Photo Management app. By building on Photo Station and Moments (album sharing, facial recognition and timeline) the new Synology Photos application combines functionality into a single app. Synology photos allows for easy sharing of photos, shared spaces and smart albums based on facial recognition. Smart search filters make finding a photo down to the metadata level.
Conclusion
This event was informative, while I miss being face to face it was nice to see the promise of many new features coming in 2021. Specifically, I am very interested to see how the global deduplication functionality will integrate with older NAS devices. While Synology DSM 7 is still in beta at the time of writing, we will keep you up to date when it launches.
Having much of the IT world moving into the online and remote workspace this year has seen many companies scramble to pivot their offerings to online and virtual. Synology has evolved to consolidate their applications making them easier to deploy and manage.
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