AWS CloudTrail vs. Nasuni vs. Synology DiskStation

It is necessary to enable [AWS] Cloudtrail when using AWS in a production environment, otherwise you will not have any idea what is happening within your accounts. Third party monitoring applications will all require [AWS] CloudTrail to be enabled as well. I would not recommend it solely as a monitoring tool, to get the most out of it you must send the logs elsewhere. Either to Cloudwatch logs or a third party product.

Incentivized

Well suited if you have a lot of data that doesn't need to be stored and read right away. I think even if you don't have much data, you can still use it for it's intended purpose to great effect, but think of it as the more data you have, the even better it will work. I don't think it would be particularly useful if you already have a slick file restore system in place and you don't need to store your data elsewhere with redundancy.

Incentivized

The Synology DiskStation is well suited as a NAS solution, easy enough to mirror a Windows file server shares setup. Access to the Hyperbackup utility eliminates the need to purchase a tape backup solution. A portable USB drive can be used as the initial backup target. For air gap purposes can connect Hyperbackup to the various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP to copy backup data there. Utilizing it as a backup solution has also been great, instead of purchasing a tape solution, tapes and an offsite tape repository. Active Backup for Business is another excellent backup utility for physical servers, VMWare virtual machines, etc. Restoring files is fairly intuitive. Until Synology introduced the dual controller setup, using it as a SAN was less appropriate as there was occasional downtime when the controller had an issue but this was less important for the scenarios we were using it for. It would be more of a concern if we had used it for things that require more robust uptime requirements. Overall we are happy with the features of the Synology DiskStation.

Incentivized

• API Log
• User activity tracking
• Real-time alerts

Incentivized

• The management console is extremely simple and easy to navigate, making common tasks easy to do.
• Our storage appliance is configured to snapshot data several times an hour, making the risk of data loss very low.
• Data restores are very intuitive, and take seconds to initiate regardless of whether it is one file or 300GB of data. We have successfully restored many Gigs of data in minutes.

Incentivized

• Synology DiskStation offers lots of options for creating links to share files or request that some uploads files. It makes it really easy to just share a link that can have an expiration or a set number of times it is accessed.
• We always had enough storage on our Synology DiskStation, we never had to worry about something being too big to upload or share.
• Love how you can create folders that are shared and also have some that are private. This makes it so easy to have shared collaborations with coworkers or clients, but also allows you to have a private place to save things that only you need.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] Cost can easily get out of control with multiple trails on full logging
• Logs can be difficult to decipher

Incentivized

• Better analytics when issues arise.
• Better onboarding documentation.
• Real-time monitoring.

Incentivized

• While BTRFS is a more advanced file system than ext4, it also is in a perpetual state of development, with many features not fully functional and a plethora of bugs. Synology has managed to overcome many of these limitations by placing BTRFS on top of a LVM, but there are much better file systems that Synology could have used, such as OpenZFS.
• DSM's built-in backup software, HyperBackup, while robust, oftentimes runs into issues. Specifically, backups can be working fine for months or years, and then suddenly the backups will fail. Sometimes these failures can be resolved, but oftentimes the backups need to be completely restarted. Fortunately, even when the backup fails, the existing backups are still accessible, it is just that new backups can not be performed.
• The underlying Linux OS provides significant benefits, but also adds a fair amount of complexity. Most of that complexity is wonderfully hidden by the DSM interface, but when certain problems arise, delving into the Linux command line is not out of the question.
• Perhaps the biggest issue with Synology DiskStation is Synology's support. The issue isn't that the support is bad, but it can be frustratingly slow when dealing with a major issue. Synology does have a very active community that is always willing to help, but nothing beats first-party support.

Incentivized

As long as Synology give us support for our hard drivers we will not change. I know Synology has now forced their hands to buy their own hard drivers and their new line of products. But if we still have support for old hard drivers from other manufacturers then we will still use Synology Nas. Otherwise we change manufacturers

As I mentioned, the user interface is amazing and straight forward. It's very easy to learn how to configure and restore files. I would like a bit more reporting, especially in terms of live reporting and monitoring. The support is great when you have a question on how to do something, which helps with usability.

Incentivized

The Synology DiskStation is easy to set up and manage. The interface is clean and features are well documented. These units are reliable and can be set up to do scheduled integrity checks so failures can be mitigated before they halt business operations. The available packages for expanded roles makes these devices versatile.

Incentivized

Again, it may have a little to do with the size and speed of your own environment, but we've been nothing but pleased with the speed of access of the files - even pulling old files from the cloud storage. Recovery of huge and many data files is a bit slow if you don't have the specs of the filer up to snuff.

Incentivized

Unfortunately, the one time I've had to reach out to DiskStation support, it did not go well. My NAS appliance wasn't appearing on the network, and no matter what the support team tried, they could not get it back online. Instead of offering to send me a new unit, they told me to go buy a new one - obviously, this was a disappointing response and not very eco-friendly either! Fortunately, through some internet research of my own, and some ingenuity, I figured out I could restore my NAS to factory settings by removing all the drives and resetting. Only then did I realize I had a bad disk. I had to experiment for a while to figure out which one it was. Once I had done that, though, I was able to get the latest DiskStation loaded back on, no thanks to the DiskStation support crew. If notifications were rock solid, I suspect I would have caught the bad disk before it because an OS problem, but I never received a bad-disk notification.

Incentivized

I think in the end, CloudTrail has more features and you can dive deeper inside the logs so it depends on your usage and what you expect in the end to make the right choice, I would say that both tools are really useful and bring a lot of benefits to I.T. companies.

Incentivized

The technical support and escalation path for Nasuni is much more reliable and efficient. No getting transferred to various teams. Often times, the person who answers your call is able to resolve your issue. If they cannot, they get the case assigned to the appropriate engineer right away. Time to close has always been very good.

Incentivized

Synology DiskStation packs a punch with the latest and greatest feature set which goes above and beyond many other vendors. It allows for a turn-key solution to cover almost every use case in the SMB market leaving other vendors behind.

Incentivized

• Allows us to investigate any strange api actions
• Increases security
• Audit trail of changes made in AWS

Incentivized

• Dramatically reduced time spent managing our storage platform. Quotas and reporting tools take all the guesswork out of data growth. Updates are easy to deploy. Time freed up can be used for more user-facing activities that we consider more valuable to the organization.
• The overall stability of the platform has been very good. We have been running on the same hardware for the past four years without any performance issues.

Incentivized

• Minimal investment in the hardware, big return on productivity
• Streamlined IT needs, we no longer have to hire our IT vendor to assist us as regularly as we did when we were running servers
• Productivity on the road through web access has increased productivity and billable hours for remote employees

Incentivized