One of the largest firms in the NAS storage world right now is Synology; which is known for its strength in delivering a range of products from affordable single-disk NAS offerings to, more recently, full enterprise storage offerings and, despite this diverse range, the firm offers up the same, fully-functional, DiskStation Manager software solution on the full range of its products, leaving consumers with only the choice of how many disks and how much performance.
Today, Synology announced the release of DiskStation Manager 4.0. The new software offers up some rather impressive and rather useful features, which could add some serious value to the product range for some users.
New Home and Home Office Features:
- Antivirus Essential- Included antivirus software
- Improved Apple support- added support for Airport Express/Extreme and integration with iCloud saves time in configuration
- Enhanced mobile support- updated apps for iOS, Android (including tablets), and Amazon Kindle Fire
- Cloud Station and QuickConnect- for easy file synchronization
- Improved Package Center
New Business Features:
- Improved ADS/ACL support- Edit and audit ACLs from within DSM
- Improved notification system- Users can select which events will notify and which methods will be used (email, SMS, instant messaging, and even push notifications)
- VPN client- The DiskStation can now act as a VPN server or client
- VLAN support- DiskStations can now work over VLAN segments
- DHCP server
- Scheduled SMART scans
- LUN backup software
For home users, the ability to perform automatic scans of networked content and new downloads will save the trouble of purchasing extra antivirus licences and leaving a computer permanently connected to the network for scanning. Cloud Station enables the easy synchronisation of files to and from the NAS through a synch'd folder both locally and, for those fortunate enough to sport a fast internet connection, the worldwide web.
The most appealing change in the 4.0 release comes on the business side of things, LUN backup. For those who may be new to the world of iSCSI, it is a solution that allows a computer to mount a drive over the network and treat it as if it were a local SCSI disk, providing a raw, high-performance link; with specialised hardware even capable of using it as a boot disk. iSCSI has become popular in the world of virtualization, with the technology typically used to host virtual machines over gigabit and 10-gigabit Ethernet. LUN backup enables efficient, incremental and secure block-level backup of data stored on iSCSI targets, a feature that would typically require a minimum spend of ~£800 for a licensed copy of VMware and a third party backup solution. Instead, a user can now use the free VMware Hypervisor and rely on the backup capabilities of the Synology product.
With many new features and improvements introduced with each DiskStation Manager iteration, we wonder exactly what new goodies 5.0 will have in store.
