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!
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:
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.
We are always in search of new ways to make Syneto products faster, easier to use and more reliable so our customers enjoy a powerful product that will offer great quality for their investment. Lately, our engineers have been working hard on fixing a few bugs and quirks in the UTM platform. The result: UTM version 1.4.2. Below are just a few of the fixes included in this version. We highly encourage you to update to this latest version to benefit from these improvements.
Fixes:
• DNS cache refreshes correctly when nameservers change
• IP aliases with a /32 netmask are now accepted
• Correctly align elements in tables (NAT, filters)
• Prevent a browser caching issue requiring admin. to clear the cache after an upgrade
• Optimize memory usage when antivirus scanning is not enabled
• Downloading and installing updates while under heavy load no longer blocks UTM
• Dashboard graphics now show properly in Internet Explorer
• Attempting to set an empty password for ssh access is no longer permitted
• Web category statistics no longer stop updating in certain conditions
• Update antivirus more reliably
• Editing an alias IP address will now properly rename the network and interface definition
• Enabling HTTP proxy on a bridge interface now works properly
• Default system update URL is now set correctly
For more information and details on the Unified Threat Management platform, visit our website or demo the product.
Syneto, TEP, UTMA 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
1. New and more flexible Folder permissions
In version 2.2 folder permissions where not manageable from UI. Editing a folder now provides a new configuration tab : Access Control. There you can easily change the owner, group or the traditional UNIX permissions for a folder.
Have you wondered how you can restrict or grant user/group based access to a folder while your Storage is in a workgroup ? That’s why we introduced the new ACL model. Granting or denying access to a folder is now as simple as creating a new ACL rule. Just select the user/group and the actions he’s allowed/restricted to do.
2. Improved CIFS sharing while in Active Directory
After joining an active directory domain you would like your AD domain administrator to be able to manage access to different shares. With version 2.2 this becomes trivial. After joined in the domain go to Accounts section select user ‘root’ and map it to the administrator of the active directory domain. This is it, one click. The Administrator of the domain is now able to configure the access to any share from the Windows side using the traditional Windows file security tab.
3. Local users and groups management
Local users and groups can now be managed from the Accounts section. You are now able to create/remove users and groups and change a user profile (home directory, password, group affiliations). In addition to other users the admin can now manage it’s own SSH keys for password-less logins. Tired of searching for a user/group in a long list ? You don’t have to anymore, just type it’s name in the new search bar and it takes you there.
4. Improved Active directory integration
We have improved the integration with active directory by allowing the administrator to provide the LAN Manager Authentication level when joining an active directory server. So if you ever had problems with joining a Windows 2008 R2 AD server just set the LMAUTH level to 2 and you are all set.
5. Static routes management
We have introduced static routes management in the networking section. Your storage can now connect to any device that’s not in it’s local network … just provide the network route for it to get there.
And there is more …
Check out the release notes for more details.
Storage, Syneto
We are proud to announce the release of the Syneto Storage software version 2.1 which is now available to our customers. Syneto engineers are always trying to meet our customer’s needs with new ideas and a fresh outlook on the storage environment.
This release comes with a whole new interface that’s friendlier and limits the time you spend configuring the storage to a minimum. Looking to empower the user, we’ve added a new history feature for the pool operations, that helps you keep track of all actions performed on a disk pool.
Starting with version 2.1, we introduced a new licensing model that ensures all products have the same set of basic features, while providing more advanced capabilities using pay-per-feature licenses.
Also in this release, several bug fixes and new functionality were added for CIFS/SMB, iSCSI and NFS, not to mention several IP, TCP, FC fixes and driver updates.
Here are a couple of screenshots of the new release, click to enlarge:
We would love to hear your opinion.
Enjoy.
Storage, SynetoI am very happy to announce that the Syneto team has become even richer with the addition of a new team member: Dragos Chioran. He will be in charge of several marketing related activities, amongst which taking care of our online presence.
Be prepared to see some awesome (and more frequently updated) content in the near future. I have heard rumors he’ll even be announcing something these days, so be sure to come back soon.
SynetoSeeing as how this is the first post of the year, please allow me to wish all of you a great 2010, may it be better than the year we just ended.
I’ve been really quiet during the last few months, as we’ve been very busy developing, but this time I have some great news to share with you.
October last year we signed a strategic agreement with Commtouch – one of the leading providers of global email and web threat intelligence, with thousands of clients in over 190 countries. What does that mean for the Syneto family of products? It means that the level of detection of our email protection engines gained a great performance boost, effectively transforming us in a top competitor in the email security market.
Why are we announcing this only now? We wanted to wait until we were really close to releasing a product with the new technology incorporated, and that product is the next generation of our Syneto UTM – version 1.3.0, in which we integrated the Commtouch Antispam, Antivirus and IP reputation engines, along with a lot of other great enhancements to our product. I will blog more on the technical details in the following days, but I am sure you will be amazed by the progress we made.
The good news is the new version is pretty close to release, as we are entering the RELEASE CANDIDATE phase at the beginning of next week (January 18th). That means we will be releasing the final version in the first days of February. Meanwhile, if you would like to take part in the evaluation of the RELEASE CANDIDATE, please send me an email at flavius(at)syneto(dot)net and I will gladly help you obtain a copy.
Syneto, UTM