Workforce mobility and the rise of cloud
services is an essential part of any business, but it creates a number of
challenges for IT. Data spread across devices and cloud services, unpredictable
schedules, and varied network connections all complicate efforts to protect and
govern enterprise information.
The Druva Cloud Platform (formerly Druva inSync &
Druva Phoenix) provides unified data protection, management, and information
governance across endpoints and cloud…
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DiskStation
Score 8.8 out of 10
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DiskStation is a line of network-attached storage (NAS) solutions from Synology headquartered in Taiwan.
The way Druva Data Resiliency Cloud stacks up against the Veeam products I was looking into at the time is that eventhoguh Veeam was a more nuture company, I thought that Druva was more developed on the cloud side since that is were they stated and did not have to try to …
Any of the other products I may have looked at had a much higher entry cost, so we did not even try a demo. Druva's cost was one that I thought we might be able to justify, and they were willing to give us a generous demo period for an extensive evaluation.
We tried two others and the main feature at the time was the ability to backup locally to a caching server, thus allowing faster backups and faster restores
Synology stacks up very well against the QNAP and the Nexsan. We used to find the Nexsan was very power-hungry in the data centre as well as being very loud to run. We still run a QNAP in our environment which works in a very similar way and with a similar interface as Synology …
100% cloud backup solution that was implemented well and easy to use. Great communication from our AE through the process and whenever needed. There is a robust admin web management portal that offers a fairly granular user privilege setup and the ability to add different regions in backup. Druva Security Cloud doesn't require a lot of bandwidth or additional resources for either backups or restores. Users can independently recover their data. We are able to back the files up both individually and at a group level. The support team is 24/7 and easily accessible. Biggest con, in this day and age, is that it would be great to have an admin smartphone application. More details when the backup is running would be nice as well as more customizable reports. Also some cosmetic bugs related to the UX, but nothing huge.
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.
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.
They have more ways to improve in Analytics section and UX.
I recommend to have to integrate with the cloud storages cheaper option to store backups which would be tremendous for customers to save snapshots costs.
Love to see Druva Data Resiliency Cloud have a better rbac policy on who can trigger the DR engine.
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.
This is the second company I've brought to Druva. Just today, I was tasked with recovering a file from a user that last saw it 6 months ago. I was able to restore it in under 5 minutes of getting the request. It's really that easy.
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
The product is easy to navigate and manage. Setup and configuration is also easy. We did not need to pay for any additional professional services. Our account team worked with use on the integration. It was not complex or difficult to learn how to setup and use. End users also have the ability to log in and manage their own files and emails
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.
Like any service, there are scheduled maintenance periods and unscheduled outages, however outages have been very limited and fortunately have not had any impact on our environment.
Page response in the admin center is acceptable- rarely are we waiting for data to load. Backup speeds seem fine, and restore speeds are OK considering it's likely pulling data from cold storage. It often takes 30-60 seconds for the restore to begin transferring files, but speeds are acceptable thereafter
We had an issue in my first year that took a long time to fix. The support guy was awesome, took screen shots, filled me in, was professional, but it just took so long. I do think that was an anomaly, but it certainly sticks out nonetheless. Beyond that, we've had pretty good support "relationships" with the reps. They're usually pretty prompt at getting back and quite knowledgeable. Just make sure you have your proxies updated, because that's always step 1!
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.
Implementation from cloud ranger to Druva Data Resiliency Cloud platform was a seamless integration experience to upgrade the policies and license for continual backup/recovery support. This may be one of the best "set it and forget it" apps for backup solutions, that also allow notifications for failures etc...
We evaluated VMWare as a provider and found their dependence on IaaS or on-premises setup was a deal breaker. Being all-cloud really required that we have a cloud-native SaaS backup solution. VMWare and other IaaS and on-prem providers really could not match Druva Data Resiliency Cloud's abilities, at least not that we were able to determine.
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.
As the product is cloud based within AWS, scaleability is unlimited. The on-premise units of scale are predictable and allow administrators to scale up / down as needed. In my experience, the flexibility around these appliances, allow organisations to vertically or horizontally scale the environment with confidence and ease. Conversely, it is possible to set thresholds to ensure that organisations do not over commit and manage budgets effectively.
Using Druva has simplified greatly the backup process. Once fully configured to your business needs, Druva provides a fast amount of backups.
Druva has saved a lot of time for the IT team. Usually time is wasted by staff members searching for a missing email. Now, they reach out to us or use their own Druva account to locate a missing email quickly and easily.
