For over a decade storage specialists Synology have held yearly events marking major and more modest developments made by their designers and developers in the past 12 months, and communicated near-term ambitions for and expansions to their NAS portfolio. The truly novel nature of the approach however is in who they communicate with: stakeholders, running the gamut of NAS and cloud storage users ranging from small home environments to huge enterprise deployments, in person. While COVID put at dampener on their planned event last September, the 2021 AND BEYOND virtual seminars did at least keep up with the tradition of open discussion.

The highlight of 2021 AND BEYOND was the announcement of DiskStation Manager 7.0, the latest major revision to the unifying DSM software that underpins Synology's entire NAS product range. It would enter a beta testing phase soon after, and today the team have concluded that the update is almost ready to deploy worldwide. DSM 7.0 will be available starting from June 29th, paving the way for new C2 Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud products that complement their core business in July.

According to Synology DSM is the world's largest NAS OS with over 8 million deployments worldwide. Their first-party addons such as Synology Drive, Active Backup suite and more, enjoy more than six million monthly downloads. In the 18 months since COVID mitigation restrictions began worldwide distributive working practices have tested the capabilities of cloud storage and associated services like never before, creating new opportunities as shortfalls in current provision become clear. Even without a culture-shift to more remote working, the generation of duplicative data in business would quickly overwhelm modern enterprise and even some medium-sized businesses. DSM and Synology's Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud services aim to ameliorate that key structural weakness while streamlining productivity and strengthening both data integrity and process security.



DSM 7.0 brings with it Active Insight, a large-scale device monitoring and diagnostics solution, Hybrid Share, which combines C2 storage flexibility and synchronization capabilities with on-premises solutions, and C2 Identity, a hybrid cloud directory as a service to simplify cross-site domain management. These modules will begin to gradually roll-out from July 13th, giving DSM 7.0 two weeks room to breathe before this brand new functionality becomes available. Secure SignIn meanwhile will be a central feature of DSM 7.0, offering a two-factor authentication process that's straight-forward to implement and use.

Scheduled for roll-out once DSM 7.0 is in place are C2 Password, C2 Transfer and C2 Backup, standalone solutions to protect passwords, share sensitive files, and back up any endpoints and common SaaS cloud services. Synology are also broadening regional provision of cloud services to increase availability and reduce latency, beginning with a new data centre in Taiwan that will serve key markets in the Asia Pacific region.

Availability

DSM 7.0, which has now concluded over 7 months of public testing, will have staggered availability for each NAS product platform. Select Plus, value, and J series products are expected to have the update available from June 29th, while Synology anticipate that XS, SA, and FS series devices will receive updates later in Q4 2021. New C2 services will deploy gradually starting from July 13th. More information on DSM 7.0 is available at https://www.synology.com/en-uk/beta/DSM70Beta, while the C2 Storage platform finds its home at https://c2.synology.com/en-global/storage.