Alias, one of our distributors in Italy has just finished a great video which underlines the many advantages of Syneto Storage. Click on the image below to view it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lastly, the Syneto Team wishes you a warm Happy Holidays!

Documentation, General, Storage, Syneto

With the launch of vSphere 5, there is a lot of buzz around virtualized server architectures. Let’s take a look at what Syneto’s Unified Storage does to make virtualization efficient and cost-effective. Syneto offers a range of cost-effective Unified Storage solutions perfect for virtualization and disaster recovery.

Both NFS (NAS) and iSCSI protocols are supported. Below we have described the storage efficiency features and virtualization advantages that make Syneto Storage so good at this job.

A virtualization scenario in Legacy Storage

Fig.1 Virtualization of the most critical Servers occurs in ESX1. With the addition of other virtual machines, ESX2 and ESX3, the backup server is overwhelmed.

A virtualization scenario with Syneto Storage

Fig.2 With the VM’s located on the storage itself, an infinite number of backups are possible and space efficient

Backups (Snapshots) in the virtual enviroment

 

 

Backing up a legacy virtual environment can be very taxing on storage space. Backups for them grow continuously and incrementally and are not usually kept for long periods of time.

Legacy backpus while keeping memory consistency:

• Make a snapshot in a virtual environment
• Make a backup with the virtualizer software module or third-party
• Reconsolidate the snapshot
• Takes a long time to consolidate a snapshot

 

Syneto & the magic of copy on write

Copy-on-write (COW) is a transactional model in which data blocks that contain used data are never overwritten. The advantage of Cow is that you can keep old versions of data blocks without incurring a huge space penalty. Also, the system is very fast thanks to the ZFS filesystem. Backups are created quikly, old blocks are only labeled because the data is already in place.
The section below contains a graphic illustration of how data is handled in Backups with ZFS copy-on-write:

 

Fig.5 Initial Filesystem

 

 

 

 

Fig.6 The filesystem is backed-up

 

 

 

 

Fig.7 No data is written in Data3 (thanks to COW)

 

 

 

 

Fig.8 Data2 is deleted

 

 

 

 

Fig.9All backups are deleted

 

 

Backups (Snapshots) on Syneto Unified Storage

Syneto Storage allows you to  make Backups (Snapshots) which can be maintained for an unlimited amount of time in two ways:

First – while keeping memory consistency
1. Make a vmware backup
2. Make a storage backup
3. Delete the vmware snapshot

Second – without keeping memory consistency
Custom backup schedule for each datastore with one or more backups on the storage

Below, Fig.10 and Fig.11, you can see regular and automatic backups on the interface:

 

 

Another key element is the notifications. Syneto Storage is equipped with a monitoring system that watches every single datasore and the events on it.

If Something goes wrong it will quikly contact a list of users so that the issue can be resolved in a timely fashion.

 

Optimization with reduplication and data compression
Deduplication: only one copy of a virtual machine is written on the storage when a template is used by multiple machines.
In-line Deduplication: All data is deduplicated as it is written on the storage
Compression: offers almost the same gains as deduplication in terms of space and uses less resources (RAM and processor)

 

You can experience the flexibility and agility that Syneto Storage brings to your datacenter by trying it out. You can download it free of charge for small datacenter environments or evaluation purposes. The available version is a fully functioning sample of the software that manages up to 1TB of disk space.

Documentation, Storage, Syneto, Uncategorized

A public version of the Syneto Unified Storage software is currently available for download on our website. You can download it free of charge for small datacenter environments or evaluation purposes. The available version is a fully functioning sample of the software that manages up to 1TB of disk space.

The installation sequence is quick and easy and you can implement it either by using the provided DVD image or the USB one. Detailed installation instruction are available here. For a broader perspective, check out the dedicated download page below and the release notes.

 

Documentation, Storage, Syneto

Our security partner Commtouch has just released the latest Internet Threat Report for April 2011, offering an interesting glimpse at what dangers we can expect this year. Worldwide spam has taken a serious blow with the takedown of Rustock botnet, reportedly responsible for over 50 million spam messages/day. The crackdown on Rustock has also reduced the number of daily active zombies operating as unwilling henchmen for spam distribution.

 

With Syneto and other security assets converging to tighten the noose around internet threats, spammers are thinking of new ways to distribute harmful content. This spring, email born malware makes a comeback – up to 30% of daily mail, PDF malware hides in fake Xerox scanner notifications, Facebook chat and phony Facebook apps were used to spread malware and the powerful Kama Sutra virus has accompanied a host of PowerPoint presentation.
In the spotlight:

• 149 billion – spam messages sent/day
• 258 thousand – Zombies slaving away daily
• India – still the most Zombie infested country
• Pharmacy add – make up 28% of spam
• Parked domains – most likely category to contain malware

To get a full picture at what’s to come this year download the report and take a look at Syneto’s Security Center
Syneto offers the perfect weapon to fight the ever expanding range of internet threats, Total Email Protection, so be sure to take a look.

Documentation

To help you get more information about our services, we are opening a new section on our website: Resources. It contains informative material (PDF format) aimed at people in executive positions that a friendly, simple overview of the Syneto products and services.

Right now, it contains two sections:

• The case studies show how various companies implemented Syneto products in real life environments.
• The presentation flyers describe our main services. We also periodically include the quarterly threat report published by our partner Commtouch.

We hope you will find them useful. As always, if you have any suggestions, feel free to let us know what kind of additional material you might need.

To download the documents, go to Support > Resources.

Documentation, Website

Commtouch, our email security partner, recently released a new trends threat report for the first quarter of 2010. This is an invaluable resource for all of us actively trying to understand the levels of Internet threats, and to assess our most vulnerable points.

Some data from the report:

• 183 billion spam/phishing emails are sent every day
• 305.000 new zombies activated daily
• One particular virus (Mal/Bredo) has no less than 838 variants
• Pornography websites are most likely to be infected with malware

To read more, download the report.
Syneto has a great solution against all email threats. To see how you can secure the company’s network, take a look at our Total Email Protection service.

PS: Commtouch also has a great tool that allows you to determine the threat level of a particular IP. You can find it at this URL: http://www.commtouch.com/check-ip-reputation.

Documentation

The level of threat that Internet users are exposed to continues to grow each quarter.

Earlier this week, Commtouch released Q4 2009 Internet Threats Trend Report, a 20-page document describing what the reality of Internet security is circa late 2009. Highlights of the document include:

• 312,000 zombies were activated on average each day of the quarter
• Spam levels ranged between 68% (late December) and 98% (in November), averaging at 77% throughout the quarter
• One proficient virus masqueraded in emails coming from Facebook, DHL, UPS, the government etc.
• For a sample malware (Mal-Bredo A), the time difference between it being revealed in the Commtouch security labs and other antivirus vendors was 11.77h (Microsoft), 25.88h (Kaspersky), and even larger than 98h (Symantec, TrendMicro)

If you want to take advantage of Commtouch’s international network of malware detection, one simple answer would be the new Total Email Protection service that accompanies our Syneto UTM, which will be available starting with version 1.3.0 of our product.

Release date: early February 2010.

Documentation, General

As we announced in an earlier post, we are changing the way our product is documented, and also the way we collaborate with our partners and customers. We are adding 2 new functionalities to our web portal: a knowledge base and a forum.

The Syneto Knowledge Base (http://kb.syneto.net)

We have been listening to your feedback about our PDF manual and decided it was time for a change: from now on, the technical documentation will reside in electronic format in our knowledge base. What does this mean to you?

• Easier search – try searching for PPTP for instance
• Print only what you need – each article has its own print link, so you don’t have to print the whole thing or spend time chasing the page numbers
• Access from anywhere – wherever there is Internet, you get access to the Syneto knowledge
• Help us improve – each article has a “comment” section, where you can tell us if there’s something wrong or missing

The Syneto Forum (http://www.syneto.net/forum/)

We want to start hearing from you: who you are, what great achievements have you accomplished using the Syneto UTM, what problems is it causing or what you would like to see it feature. We even have an “International” section where you are encouraged to use your own mother tongue. Off-topic is also allowed: we really like blonde jokes and links to youtube videos. :)

We really hope you will enjoy our two new features and encourage you to take them for a spin: Syneto Knowledge Base, Syneto Forum.

Documentation

We are preparing a surprise for you. Next week we’ll be releasing the fruits of an effort to better service the Syneto UTM users. The documentation as you now know it will be history… Think better search, easier findability and ubiquity.

Check back by the website and blog early next week to find out what we have in store for you. In the meantime, have a nice weekend!

Edit: we revealed the surprise in this post.

Documentation, UTM