The Storage Box That Is Geared To Pick a Fight

Synology has spent 25 years perfecting the art of network-attached storage for everyone from home users to mid-sized businesses. Now, the Taiwanese company is throwing its hat into the enterprise ring with the PAS7700, a ground-up redesign that targets the same high-performance storage market dominated by NetApp and Dell EMC.

The PAS7700 is more than a scaled-up NAS box. Underneath its hood, it represents Synology’s answer for a fundamental shift in enterprise storage. The explosive demand for AI workloads that can churn through millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS) with sub-millisecond latency requires a different approach to storage.

“We hear you that you’re not seeing a ton of relief from other incumbent storage vendors on the market today,” said Cody Hall, the product manager at Synology America Corp., during the product’s debut at COMPUTEX Taipei. “So, because of this, Synology feels it’s time for something new.”

Creating a new system around storage

That “something new” is a dual-controller, active-active NVMe array built around AMD’s EPYC processors. The system, housed in a 4U rack chassis, pushes 2 million 4K random read IOPS through 1.66 petabytes of NVMe SSD storage, connected via four 100-gigabit Ethernet ports or 16GB Fibre Channel, and optimized for virtual machines on VMware Hyper V container platforms. Synology is also introducing a dedicated OS, but still based on its DiskStation Manager (DSM) but with additional features more suited for enterprises. 

But the real story isn’t just the raw numbers but how Synology engineered the entire stack around those drives. “It’s one thing to be able just to jam some NVMe SSDs into any old box,” Hall explained. “What we did in this case is we actually built this entire system around the drives from the ground up. We did not repurpose another rack style that we had previously.”

This architectural commitment shows in the protocol support. Beyond traditional SMB, NFS, and iSCSI, the PAS7700 speaks native NVMe languages: NVMe over TCP, NVMe over Fibre Channel, and NVMe over RDMA. It means the new system can communicate with modern applications in their preferred dialect.

During live demonstrations, the PAS7700 sustained over 1 million 8k read IOPS while serving SQL databases with less than one millisecond latency. For electronic design automation (EDA) workloads — the compute-intensive tasks used to design everything from AI chips to automotive processors — the system cranked out 1,300 job sets per second.

Scaling up channel performance

Synology’s enterprise ambitions face practical challenges, particularly around support and market perception. When pressed about handling mission-critical workloads, Hall acknowledged the company is “piloting some of our tier one support models for premium support” in the U.S., with plans to expand globally through partner training programs.

The company is doubling down on its channel-first approach across ASEAN markets. “For us, partner is very, very important,” explains Thachawan Chinchanakarn, Synology’s regional manager. “I don’t think Synology will have the success today without support from our partner.” The strategy involves strengthening partner relationships through quarterly training programs and maintaining close collaboration. “We divide group of partner to three groups. First is a new partner, so how we can implement them, how we can strengthen their knowledge. Second is our existing partner. Our key is how to grow together with them. And number three is our distributors.”

In Singapore, Antoine Yang, the country manager, takes a startup-like approach to enterprise sales, recognizing the brand awareness challenge against established players like Dell and NetApp. “I need to generate more market awareness about Synology, so let customer knows that our values,” Yang notes. His strategy involves hands-on demonstrations and proof-of-concept deployments. “Sometimes before customers actually buying these devices, I need to present them. I need to do the POC to make sure we are passing their company compliance.”

The results are already showing. Toyota Motor Vietnam represents a prime example of Synology’s enterprise traction, deploying the company’s backup solutions and Active Backup for Business appliances to protect critical data. “We are very efficient that they pick our solutions and they use our solution to help them to protect their valuable data,” Thachawan observes, highlighting how the automotive giant now relies on Synology’s integrated approach for data protection.

The pricing strategy remains deliberately vague, but Hall promised Synology’s “disruptive pricing model” would extend to enterprise storage. Given that the company has built its reputation on delivering enterprise-class features at SMB prices, this could be the PAS7700’s secret weapon against established players.

Rethinking the future of storage

Storage efficiency features borrowed from Synology’s consumer DNA help justify the premium NVMe investment. The system supports both inline and offline deduplication, with Hall citing game development studios as prime beneficiaries.

The PAS7700’s redundancy architecture reads like enterprise paranoia made manifest: drive-level power loss protection, triple-parity RAID, memory cache protection across controllers, IP failover, and multi-path I/O. Failovers complete in under five seconds, maintaining the always-on availability that enterprise workloads demand.

Perhaps most tellingly, the PAS7700 supports synchronous replication—continuous, real-time data copying between arrays that goes far beyond Synology’s traditional snapshot-based backup. “If you’re in an enterprise environment, sometimes five minutes in terms of snapshot cadence is a little bit too long,” Hall observed.

Whether Synology can translate its 14 million deployed units and presence in 50% of Fortune 500 companies into high-end enterprise credibility remains to be seen. But the PAS7700 represents something rare in enterprise storage: a ground-up rethink of how to serve AI-era workloads without the baggage of legacy architectures. For a company that started as a software vendor 25 years ago, it’s a remarkably hardware-forward bet on the future with a channel strategy to match.

Image credit: iStockphoto/SementsovaLesia