Derren Lu has been with Synology since the very start of the company, and has held the roles of CTO and CEO before moving to his current role, so it's fair to say he's a 'seasoned storage professional'. As Synology launches the newest version of its hugely successful DSM operating system, Lu was keen to describe how the company's vision has evolved over time to reflect shifts in IT and data management thinking.

"DSM of course is at the heart of all Synology's solution offerings, with over 10 million installations worldwide," he explained. "Organisations are realising that cloud alone can't fulfil all of their data demands, and we are therefore increasingly focused on bringing out the best of both on-premises and cloud architectures. Data is being moved more frequently than ever before, leading to ever more distributed architectures and a growth in computing at the edge. The problem organisations need to address is in how to move that data as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. This will be the key to their future success, a scenario in which everyone will need a distributed edge server."

As enterprises increasingly find the extremes of all-centralised and all-distributed storage less and less viable, they are sensibly seeking a hybrid model that works with their own data management strategies. Explaining Synology's approach further, Lu described the company's vision around edge computing: "By 'edge', we don't mean to suggest that Synology serves as one of the smaller edge devices - IoT, sensors and the like - but rather an 'edge server' that carries powerful data pre-processing and management capabilities."

The new software release, Lu explained, therefore focuses on improving the security, reliability and functionality of the storage system, along with a greater emphasis on integration with cloud services. For example, Secure Sign-In offers multi-factor authentication to avoid the inherent security risks of password-based access, while additional security improvements address data security itself via RAID6 performance enhancements, offering better disk fault-tolerance without compromising performance . DSM 7.0's Active Insight intelligent management platform is a cloud-based, real-time monitoring tool that offers a remarkably intuitive interface for users at all levels as well as managers and storage administrators. Lu summarised it thus: "Active Insight is designed to make it easier to fix all kinds of NAS issues, from anywhere."

Lu believes that as business data growth rates continue to curve ever upward, the on-premise NAS is beginning to take on a new role as effectively an edge storage server: "As users are able to process as well as store their data, we are seeing closer integration between storage and the global architecture. This is what has driven us to develop DSM as what we describe as 'a truly next-generation NAS OS'. While we have long been known for our highly-regarded on-premise data management solutions, our customers are increasingly realising that we are also very well positioned to understand the importance and benefits of hybrid and cloud approaches."

As far as functionality goes, Synology's focus for the future is very much on flash, as Lu goes on to explain: "We expect - and in fact ideally we would want - users to move to all-flash, so it is important that we make that as easy and reliable as possible. DSM 7.0 will include all-flash optimisation as well as SSD cache optimisation to help users to manage their data."

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"Organisations are realising that cloud alone can't fulfil all of their data demands, and we are therefore increasingly focused on bringing out the best of both on-premises and cloud architectures. Data is being moved more frequently than ever before, leading to ever more distributed architectures and a growth in computing at the edge. The problem organisations need to address is in how to move that data as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible."

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Other functionality boosts include the ability to store up to 10 times more files on a Synology Drive server, while performance again is actually better than previously. There are also plans, added Lu, to introduce data deduplication into DSM, though it is not available immediately as of the June announcement; watch this space.

One aspect of DSM's functionality improvements that had Lu particularly excited was the announcement of Peta Volume support - meaning that archives that were previously limited to a maximum size of 200TB can now be as large as 1PB, again with no impact on system performance. Lu described this innovation as something that several of their largest customers are already falling over themselves to get hold of, as so many organisations such as broadcast and VFX companies require ever larger shared folders that can manage very large files.

"Peta Volume is a cost-effective solution for data-critical environments that delivers petabyte-sized storage," Lu enthused. "Enterprises can now centralise all their data without moving it around as often." In fact Synology has already adopted Peta Volume to meet its own growing storage needs internally, he explains: "Our data grew by 35% during the past year, and with more exponential growth on the way, we expect to reach 1 petabyte of data within the next seven years. If we take this 35% expansion rate per year, Peta Volume has effectively helped us delay the need for this migration by 7 years, giving our teams more opportunity to focus on other important tasks."

Hot on the heels of the new DSM 7.0 announcements came Synology's C2 cloud services platform, which mirrors the company's approach and NAS/SAN solution expertise, in a move that Lu described as "Empowering our entire eco-system: while we're rightly best known for our on-premise data management solutions, with C2 we are demonstrating how deeply we understand the benefits of hybrid and cloud approaches."

The newest C2 offerings, building on the success of C2 Storage, include C2 Backup (intuitive and rapid backup based on the amount of storage needed, and starting at under 50 euros a year), C2 Identity (building on the ID management services already described), C2 Transfer (described as a 'foolproof' encrypted file transfer service) and C2 Password (offering - free - credential and password management services).

Lu concluded by explaining how the C2 enhancements tied in with the new DSM features: "It has been our long term vision to integrate DSM and public cloud, and C2 helps us and our enterprise users to move toward this goal: users will be able to backup from DSM to the cloud, easily sync and share files via the cloud, and even leverage our powerful management and monitoring functionality using Active Insight."

More info: www.synology.com