Syneto is a young European storage vendor with main offices in Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Romania, and with customers spread in all major European countries. Honestly this is a rare case, considering that most storage vendor came from US (and most of them from Silicon Valley) but it’s nice see some exception and that something good arrive also from the old continent.
This company has a clear market target (the SMB segment) and a clear vision, trying to solve this common dilemma (for the SMB market): SMEs needed storage solutions with powerful enterprise features, manageable by anyone, not requiring an IT department’s worth of people.
The company started the development of Syneto Storage OS, a scalable ZFS-based storage and virtualization solution, in 2008 (from a previous experience in Linux based UTM solutions). The pillars of their deployment where strong Open Source approach, ability of listening customers’ requirements and an agile-minded software development.
Some weeks ago, when Syneto expands and enhances complete storage line I’ve got the opportunity to talk with Dan Vâtca (Co-founder & CTO of Syneto) about their technical direction, research and strategy.
Syneto Storage OS is an Illumos-based storage operating system which leverages OpenZFS and other innovative technologies to provide a next generation storage platform.
Syneto development team is an active contributor in the Open Source community (examples can be found in some PHP library hosted on GitHub) and also in the OpenZFS community.
Syneto’s latest product line includes the new ARK Series of storage arrays for long-term archiving, a further enhanced range of ULTRA hybrid systems that use a tiered approach to decrease end-to-end latency in virtual and private cloud environments by up to 100 times, and its EXTREME family, a boosted line of all-flash arrays offering industry-leading speed and extremely high IOPS at low TCO.
The new ARK Series offers a number of attractive features including impressive data integrity to prevent data corruption over time, and unlimited scalability:
- Syneto’s IntegriCheck keeps data consistent with checksums instead of HDD sector-size modifications or dedicated hardware, ensuring that silent data corruption is detected and self-healed directly on the array;
- Syneto FlexPool enables painless capacity growth up to a (theoretical) limit of 300 million petabytes with no downtime.
The series consists of the ARK-110 model, featuring 12 bays in a 1U chassis, and the ARK-410 system, offering 36 bays in a 4U chassis and scaling up to 936TB with JBODs, and is a direct response to customer and market demands. It holds several distinct advantages over competing alternatives including a highly competitive pricing structure. The ARK arrays also include a suite of storage efficiency technologies that boost the performance of their multi-core CPUs as well as their DRAM memory; these technologies include in-line compression and in-line deduplication, that help squeeze up to 5x more data in any given storage capacity.
Syneto storage solutions are currently available through resellers and OEM partners, but they are working also on a community edition (Storage OS is available as a free download for evaluation purposes, up to 1TB, from Syneto’s website).
They are also VMware Technology Partner an their storage solution are compatible with VMware products and also tightly integrated, with the Syneto’s vSphere plug-in that unifies and simplifies VMware virtual machines management and allows you to create, clone and expand data stores directly from the UI.
This integration permit also to implement a correct integration with VMware consistent snapshots and storage replication, in order to provide a DR copy that is application consistent.
Virtual Volumes and other specific technologies are in a possible roadmap, but remember that the main focus is in the SMB area (where common vSphere edition are the Essential Plus).
There are a lot of features (like deduplication, fast clones, flash optimization, …) and different users cases, but one really interesting is the usage of those storage as an hyperconverged system (called VMBox) with the ability of run virtual server inside the storage boxes. Note that is KMV based (running on an OpenSolaris but fully compatible with the KVM Linux) and actually in this version cannot be configured in HA (available of course for the storage part). It’s something potentially useful for branch office where maybe you need a couple of local VMs.
For more information, see also:
Andrea Mauro
Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.
