Last week was the Synology 2022 and Beyond event, where Synology introduces their latest offerings.
2021 has already seen the public release of the much anticipated DSM 7.0 which we have covered off here. The keynote speech shared details on DSM 7.1 as well as numerous planned improvements across individual applications and services in the incremental dot update.
There is a heavy focus on large scale management, targeted at the business sector, particularly in the high-end and enterprise space for data protection, ease of management and security. There is particular emphasis on leveraging Synology C2 cloud services, and Synology makes no bones about some of these new services will be a subscription model.
Here are some of the key highlights.
DiskStation Manager 7.1
Synology is far from resting on their laurels after the launch of DSM 7.0. The big transition to 7.0 was not without some bugs, but 7.1 is much more than just bug fixes. There is a heavy emphasis on security, data protection and management.
From a file serving perspective, DSM 7.1 will introduce support for combining multiple file servers into a single portal for ease of user access, as well as SMB multi channel support for improved performance, DFS and Hybrid Share. There will be improve ability to overview and control multiple storage areas at once, from bare metal to those on the C2 platform.
Active Insight will underpin much of these improvements. The user interface will be tweaked and improve to ease the management tasks such as push deployment of updates across the whole storage network and continuous monitoring areas requiring attention.
Speaking of areas of concern, Active Insight is being updated to identify and triage suspicious activity in connected users by analysing historical data in usage patterns, locations and behaviour. Suspicious behaviour can be reported to the admin user and allow much faster recognition of troubling access behaviour – potentially reducing the infiltration of your storage system. This information is presented with a collation of geolocational data, breakdown of suspicious connectivity and suggestions of how to proceed, all accessible by eligible administrative users.
Active Insight in DSM 7.1 will also integrate with Hyper Backup monitoring from within the same user interface. This allows the status of backup routines from within DSM 7.1 on one or more NAS servers to be monitored, actioned or configured via the single access point. Synology has not confirmed the level of integration, but anything that starts to reduce the number of management tools required for status update is always welcome.
To further assist with management tasks, there will be updates to Out of Band Management. Future hardware releases will have an OOB port and should help reduce downtime and a need for a physical body to attend a site for troubleshooting.
Synology C2 Cloud Services
Cloud is key and cloud is king, DSM 7.1 will both rely on and leverage the C2 cloud services. Currently there are four services in the portfolio:
- C2 Backup
- C2 Identity
- C2 Password
- C2 Transfer
C2 Backup is going to turn the existing DSM backup strategies on it’s head, by targeting the entire NAS architecture, configuration and digital layout as a wholistic, comprehensive backup strategy. The details are a little skinny in the launch but all the core existing features such as deduplication, incremental backups, scheduling, custom retention policies and fast replication) will be supported in the new backup process.
C2 Identity is the business focussed directory services with a secure and low-latency hybrid approach, providing management, SSO services, and locally deployed LDAP nodes for local, intranet-only servers and devices. Both Windows and macOS device management will be supported.
C2 Password is a simple password management tool, with browser extensions as assisted login. Synology has sweeten the deal by making it a free service for individuals, and a paltry USD$4.99 a year for sharing between up to six account and without limitations to the number of devices connected.
C2 Transfer addresses the issue of sharing sensitive and/or large files to external parties easily and securely.
Surveillance Station 9.0
This app has been static for 3 years on version 8.2, but the new Surveillance Station 9.0 is landing in Q1, 2022 and will be a DSM 7.x only app.
In the keynote Synology demonstrated the new and refined user interface, bringing the Live View and Timeline View together in the same place – Monitor Center.
Things are tweaked and improve with efficiency and ease-of-use in mind. Acknowledging the time it takes to configure cameras initially, there will be an option to import cameras and configurations from a spreadsheet for example, or copy settings from a source configuration and push out to others.
Video feeds are centralised in Monitor Center which is designed for review footage, mark important footage and manage alerts easily. There is improved map integration to represent your site(s).
A big capability improvement is the ability to store recorded security footage both locally and securely to the Synology C2 cloud simultaneously.
Synology will be launching the DVA1622 two-bay NVR as an entry level, running Surveillance Station 9.0 with facial and license plate recognition capabilities.
The RT6600ax Wi-Fi 6 Router is imminent
This year seems to be the year where Synology finally moves from the old and usher in the new. The Synology line of routers have always been devices with so much potential and has been a favourite of many. The last release was the RT2600ac in 2017 and now we finally have the confirmation that the RT6600ax router is coming.
The flagship RT6600ax tri-band router is one of the first to support the expanded 5.9GHz spectrum, delivering much more room and uninterrupted operation for 160MHz devices. The design is still reminisce of a traditional router, sporting 6 antennas around the side and back of the unit. There are four Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as a 2.5GbE port for uplinks and internet connectivity.
The Synology RT6600ax router is paired with SRM 1.3, introducing faster networking and greatly expand network management capabilities.
SRM 1.3 comes with full VLAN support through an more intuitive interface for easy partitioning and separation of devices. This is something I have been clamouring for – ability to create many different SSIDs to segregate types of devices, such as IoT from my core network.
Synology has also redesigned the DR router app to bring together almost all of the management capabilities of SRM into your smartphone. It permits creation of new wireless networks, configuring parenting control, web filtering, setting traffic control scheme and more from the app.
Beyond 2022
In the keynote, Synology made a mention of Scale-Out Storage as something in development.
Traditionally expanding storage is a scale-up solution, that is, bare metal solutions with a fixed number of expansions for additional storage. Synology is taking the concept to implementation of whole storage systems made of physical nodes with a distributed file server layer. The idea is for the storage systems to form the equivalent of a RAID with whole systems being in sync.
By achieving this connectivity, it will permit connected to only interact with a single interface in the traditional way, but with the whole system or node coming online with no user experience change. This would in theory also mean any changes in the backend would be seamless to the end user with capability to add further storage nodes with relative ease. This it Synology’s concept of Scale-Out Storage.
There are some very exciting developments coming out of Synology, and we will be sure to be testing them out and giving our thoughts.
