Synology is a company dedicated to sole purpose of developing high-performance and versatile network attached storage (NAS) products. The company makes the DiskStation and RackStation family of NAS that can scale up to 22 srives (66 TB) with the latter. 

What is unique about Synology is how the company's entire product range runs on the same operating system that is under constant development, with updates offered for free. I posed some questions to Product Marketing Manager Douglas Self, who responded via email.

FCIO: Is there really a place for a NAS in the enterprise?

Douglas Self: Absolutely. We see NAS deployed in the enterprise in specific departments that require a dedicated storage pool. Another common use is for NAS to be deployed as storage in virtual networks.

FCIO: How should a business decide whether to deploy a NAS or a storage area network (SAN)?

Self: Obviously, this depends on the specific needs of the business. If the need, and especially the budget exist to deploy a SAN, then that is the direction a business should go. The advantage NAS has, particularly for SMB/SME, is that is can be deployed on existing infrastructure. Properly deploying a SAN requires deployment planning plus time and additional cost for equipment housing, UPS, cooling channels, proper electrical grids, etc.

FCIO: From your experience, what surpises businesses about NAS? What advantages might they not be aware of?

Self: The cost/performance ratio is surprisingly low. For organizations that don't need a SAN, a NAS offers flexible storage without the administrative overhead. We often hear from users who are surprised by the breadth of features. Most will buy a DiskStation for backup or file sharing and end up also hosting their website, a surveillance solution or streaming media from same DiskStation.

FCIO: Synology appears to believe in 'eating its own dog food' when it comes to the NAS sold by the company. Can you tell us more about that?

Self: Yes, we use Synology DiskStations and RackStations for running public facing web, download, forum and wiki servers. Internally, we use our systems for file sharing, backup and virtual storage.

FCIO: What are some compelling advantages offered by the DiskStation Manager (DSM) 3.1 operating system over competitors on the market?

Self: The "desktop-in-the-browser" design requires very little, if any, time to acclimate to, so users are off and running in almost no time. The real advantage for SMB/SME customers is that while the interface is easy to use, it controls many advanced enterprise-level applications. DiskStation Manager 3.1 supports deep Windows ADS integration, ACLs and File Browser makes file management effortless, both locally and remotely.

FCIO: DSM offers so many features in a single appliance; could this be a security weakness for the company's product as a whole?

Self: No, unwanted features are simply not enabled or disabled at will. Further security is provided by the built-in firewall and IP auto-blocking. We support 256-bit AES encryption for storage and for data communication security, files can be encrypted in-transit via HTTPS, SSL/TLS over FTP or SSH over rsync. DSM 3.1 also added support for admin groups so the default admin account can be disabled.

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