Synology Enters the Big League with PAS7700

After 25 years of refining network-attached storage for everyone from home users to mid-sized businesses, Synology is making a bold leap into the enterprise arena with the all-new PAS7700. This innovative storage solution is designed to compete head-on with industry titans like NetApp and Dell EMC, targeting the high-performance storage market.

Revolutionizing Storage Solutions

Forget your ordinary NAS box; the PAS7700 is a remarkable dual-controller, active-active NVMe array powered by AMD's EPYC processors. This beast, housed in a compact 4U rack chassis, boasts 1.66 petabytes of NVMe SSD storage and can deliver a jaw-dropping 2 million 4K random read IOPS, all while maintaining ultra-low latency.

Cody Hall, product manager at Synology America Corp., emphasizes the urgent need for innovation: "We recognize that the current enterprise storage providers aren't meeting demand. This is Synology's response to that challenge."

Built for Modern Demands

What distinguishes the PAS7700 isn’t just its numbers, but its carefully engineered design. Hall states, "We didn’t just shove NVMe SSDs into an existing box—we designed this system from the ground up around these drives." This commitment to excellence shines through in the diverse protocol support, enabling seamless communication with modern applications.

During live tests, the PAS7700 easily handled over 1 million 8k read IOPS with mere milliseconds of latency while powering complex SQL databases. Its performance shines in specialized tasks, cranking out 1,300 job sets per second for electronic design automation workloads—a crucial need for industries like AI and automotive.

Challenges Ahead: Gaining Market Trust

While Synology is ambitious in its enterprise aspirations, there are hurdles to overcome in terms of support and reputation. Hall mentions, "We’re piloting advanced support models in the U.S. and plan to extend them globally through enhanced partner training programs." Synology aims to foster deep relationships with partners, recognizing that success hinges on collaboration.

Building Brand Awareness

As Synology attempts to gain traction against established names like Dell, country manager Antoine Yang is taking a hands-on approach. To build brand awareness, he believes demonstrating the technology firsthand through proof-of-concept deployments is essential before potential clients commit to purchase.

A shining example of Synology's success is its partnership with Toyota Motor Vietnam, which has relied on Synology's backup solutions to safeguard vital data.

A Disruptive Pricing Strategy?

While exact pricing details for the PAS7700 remain under wraps, Hall hints at a "disruptive pricing model" that could challenge conventional enterprise pricing strategies. With Synology's reputation for delivering enterprise-level features at affordable rates, this could be a game-changer.

Redefining Storage Reliability

To complement its NVMe technology, the PAS7700 features advanced redundancy measures, including drive-level power loss protection and triple-parity RAID—essential for mission-critical enterprise environments. With failover capabilities clocking in at under five seconds, reliability is at the forefront.

Most impressively, the PAS7700 offers synchronous replication, allowing for real-time data copying—far exceeding traditional snapshot backups. "In enterprises, five minutes can feel like an eternity," Hall notes.

A Bold Future for Synology

As Synology looks to leverage its presence in 50% of Fortune 500 companies and 14 million deployed units, the launch of the PAS7700 signals a fresh approach to storage that’s tailored for the AI era. This innovative, hardware-centric strategy, combined with focused partner collaboration, positions Synology as a formidable contender in the competitive landscape of enterprise storage.