Synology Announces Highly Scalable SA6400 Storage System

[btarunr]

Synology today announced the availability of the 12-bay SA6400, its most versatile general-purpose storage system designed to provide enterprises and large studios with lightning-fast data transfer speeds and on-demand capacity expansion. "SA6400 is the ideal solution to tackle today's ever-increasing amounts of unstructured data," said Julien Chen, Product Manager at Synology. "Its ability to quickly scale as data demands grow makes it suitable to serve as file or backup storage in agile and dynamic environments, getting businesses ready for future data growth."

Storage capacity is seamlessly expandable by adding up to 8 RX1223RP expansion units for a total of 108 drive bays, making room for over 1.9 petabytes on a single system—9 times the original capacity. With a throughput of over 6,500/4,000 MB/s sequential read/write, SA6400 ensures smooth operations even in the most demanding scenarios, including enterprise data centers, large production studios, and applications in the retail or hospitality sectors. Performance can be further boosted to accommodate more streams or tackle specialized applications by upgrading the built-in 10 GbE networking to 25 or even 40 GbE.



Flexible file serving for growing teams
Comprehensive support for file and block protocols enables large-scale access to company resources over the local network or VPN, with management of access privileges made easy by Active Directory/LDAP integration.

The cross-platform Synology Drive file management and sharing solution enables organizations to create a private cloud that teams can leverage to access, edit, and share files securely, with granular permission settings for maximum security and compliance.

Integration with the cloud—either Synology's own C2 Storage or third-party cloud service providers—allows for efficient cross-site file synchronization for distributed teams or companies adopting hub-spoke organizational models.

Centralized data protection for the entire infrastructure
Keeping critical data and services protected and available is more necessary than ever with continuous and emerging cybersecurity threats.

Synology's suite for endpoint protection, Active Backup Suite, enables Windows, Linux, and macOS (coming soon) devices, Hyper-V/VMware VMs, and Microsoft 365/Google Workspace accounts to be safely backed up onto the SA6400 and quickly restored when needed.

SA6400 also includes data backup, snapshot, and replication automation services to protect shared folders and LUNs, with destinations that range from other Synology systems to the cloud for simple compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Service availability can be boosted with the Synology High Availability (SHA) service, which pairs identical units to create an active/passive cluster that ensures automatic service failover within minutes in case of unexpected downtime.

Powerful and versatile business application platform
A host of cost-efficient solutions are available through Synology DSM's own download center, containers, or virtual machines.

Built-in business applications include a complete suite of file management and productivity tools that teams can leverage to boost collaboration, as well as a private mail solution with 100% data ownership and a full-featured messaging platform for more convenient and secure communications.

Docker containers and VMs can be run on SA6400 using Docker or Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)—a hypervisor for virtualized versions of Windows, Linux, and DSM—to safely test and evaluate applications. Learn more

Availability
SA6400 and RX1223RP are available starting today through Synology partners and resellers.

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[Chrispy_]

Highly-scalable, but we'll scalp you for scaling with our vendor-locked drives that are just entry-level Toshiba NAS models with a 300% markup and our sticker over the top.

 

[Owen1982]

100% agree. Also, who is using these for enterprise? I think not many, and forcing exorbitant prices is not going to help. I also think they have weird implementation of BTRFS? Not sure I would trust mission ciritical data on it.

What is the RAID implementation for Btrfs File System on Synology NAS? - Synology Knowledge Center

Until they get with ZFS (like QNAP for example) I would not put it in a business.

 

[Chrispy_]

Exactly. They're scalping customers on disks and using a proprietary filesystem that is vendor-locked.

I don't even care if Synology's BTRFS file system has performance or resiliency advantages - All is see is that it makes the arrays incompatible with every other system and none of my existing ZFS utilities can troubleshoot problems with it.

I know I am only a sample size of one person, but I absolutely will not buy Synology at work for these proprietary filesystem reasons. The disk scalping is just one of the last nails in the proverbial coffin alongside outdated 1Gbit networking that plagues most of Synology's mainstream products.

 

[Owen1982]

Exactly. They're scalping customers on disks and using a proprietary filesystem that is vendor-locked.

I don't even care if Synology's BTRFS file system has performance or resiliency advantages - All is see is that it makes the arrays incompatible with every other system and none of my existing ZFS utilities can troubleshoot problems with it.

I know I am only a sample size of one person, but I absolutely will not buy Synology at work for these proprietary filesystem reasons. The disk scalping is just one of the last nails in the proverbial coffin alongside outdated 1Gbit networking that plagues most of Synology's mainstream products.

If my memory is correct I think you can pull the disks out and access them with Ubuntu, if you are desperate.

 

[Chrispy_]

If my memory is correct I think you can pull the disks out and access them with Ubuntu, if you are desperate.

Good to know, thankfully I've not put myself in a situation where such desperate measures are ever going to be needed.

 

[lemonadesoda]

Is that right? Are all new Synology racks now vendor-locked drives ? I have a couple of 815+'s that are going well. Perfect for small business or SOHO. I like the OS and the devices. But I won't be upgrading if vendor-locked drives is now their thing.

They also made a mess of the information they presented to users about their Apps. They were not clear on usage scenarios and which Apps were the ones they were going to develop and which ones they were going to retire (example: media managers, players, backup utilities etc.)

 

[Chrispy_]

Is that right? Are all new Synology racks now vendor-locked drives ? I have a couple of 815+'s that are going well. Perfect for small business or SOHO. I like the OS and the devices. But I won't be upgrading if vendor-locked drives is now their thing.

They also made a mess of the information they presented to users about their Apps. They were not clear on usage scenarios and which Apps were the ones they were going to develop and which ones they were going to retire (example: media managers, players, backup utilities etc.)

After massive outcry from their customers, they rolled back the 100% incompatiblity and locked functionality of DSM7. As of late 2022 (DSM 7.1), most of the NAS functionality and most of the apps still work but if you need support and you're not using Synology's own drives, you're SOL. For enterprise, that in itself is unforgivable.

The bigger issue, even if you are not bothered about enterprise support for some reason, is that it floods the eventlogs, dashboard, and notification tray with perpetual, incessant, repetitive warnings. You can never set-and-forget it because DSMs alert feature becomes completely useless. You must condition yourself to ignore warnings to live with third-party drives in a rackmount Synology NAS now, and if you can't see the problem with that you probably shouldn't be in charge of rackmount hardware in the first place.

You can at least edit the email notification rules to filter out the unauthorised disks, and thus rely on email to tell you when something needs checking, but again - it's a hideous workaround that never existed in previous versions of DSM and most of Synology's competition doesn't enforce such draconian measures at all. If Synology had kept their 7.0 strict vendor-lock to their own drives, I think they'd have lost most of their SMB and SOHO business within a year. I was strongly discouraged from buying them and pushed towards QNAP after using Synology for years because all the resellers and distributers were convinced that the DSM7 vendor-lock would be permanent.

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[Owen1982]

What I also really hate about DSM 7 is that they are really shoving their C2 platform down their users throat - you cannot even disable or uninstall the Hybrid Share app which links to their C2 platform. I don't know what info is stored or being sent and when and where...

 

[Chrispy_]

What I also really hate about DSM 7 is that they are really shoving their C2 platform down their users throat - you cannot even disable or uninstall the Hybrid Share app which links to their C2 platform. I don't know what info is stored or being sent and when and where...

Ugh, I'm glad I jumped ship. I mean, I didn't jump - Synology f*cking pushed me because they retrospectively applied this draconian BS to existing customers after they'd purchased hardware and drives!