Synology is positioning itself in the market as a one-stop shop for storage, security and office software, stressing how its portfolio can now also support the most critical workloads. In doing so, the company hopes to finally shake off its reputation as an SMB brand.
“There are still customers and partners who think Synology only offers SMB solutions,” laments Danlin Ou, Presales Manager for Synology at the company’s Solution Day in Utrecht. “That is simply not true.” On the stage at the event, Ou then explains just how broad the company’s enterprise storage portfolio has become.
Reputation
It is almost indisputable that Synology now offers a broad range of devices, relevant even for the heaviest storage requirements. Yet Ou’s remark shows that after many years Synology still keeps stumbling over the same stone. The reputation as a prosumer and SMB brand that helped make the company big sticks, even now that its focus and ambitions have shifted towards large enterprises.
The company does have a coherent story ready by now. Chad Chiang, General Director for Europe, gets to tell the essence of it. “Today we have around fourteen million systems in the market,” he says. “With those, we manage roughly 400 exabytes (400 million terabytes) of data, across different types of systems.”
The operating system running on the bulk of those systems is DiskStation Manager (DSM). That OS is now celebrating its 20th birthday, Chiang adds. This allows him to put the SMB chapter at the front of the Synology story and use it to underline the company’s experience. The message is clear: Synology has years of experience, looks after exabytes of data and has a portfolio ready that is suited to enterprise workloads, so why wouldn’t you choose the company?
Competitive market
The enterprise storage market is of course competitive. Synology has to battle other storage specialists on the one hand, including established names such as HPE and Dell. On the other hand, the convenience of the cloud beckons. The company responds by highlighting a few aspects that make it unique in the market.
For instance, there is plenty of room at the Solution Day for Alexandra Bejan, Marketing Director and a returning speaker at the company’s annual Benelux gathering. She approaches Synology from an angle centred on physical security.
After all, Synology has an end-to-end ecosystem for video security, in which storage devices naturally play a central role. The company goes much further: cameras have been part of the portfolio for many years, and the Surveillance Station software on the NAS and DVA devices is already thoroughly mature. Recently, Surveillance365 was added, the cloud version of Surveillance Station.
Cloud offers simplicity
“Surveillance365 is a cloud solution for which you need no recording server on site,” Bejan explains. “Everything happens in the cloud and you manage everything from there too. So you no longer have to find space for servers.” The cameras store their footage on a microSD card in the device itself. Optionally, a backup goes to C2, Synology’s cloud storage, with a retention period between 45 days and ten years.
According to Bejan, installation has been reduced to a few steps. “You take your camera, connect it to the network, link it to your account and you’re done,” she says. “You don’t have to wait for the IT technician to come by and set everything up.” Surveillance365 does only work with cameras from Synology’s own portfolio. The standard plan is free. For management across multiple sites, you need a paid licence.
Complement to servers
Bejan has locations in mind where a dedicated server makes little sense. “Perhaps some of you manage charging stations, construction sites or small shops in remote places,” she tells the audience. “For you, a simple cloud infrastructure that is easy to manage is the better choice.”
Surveillance365 and Surveillance Station can also be combined. A retail chain then stores sensitive footage on-premises at its head office and monitors the smaller branches via Surveillance365, from the same platform.
The story holds up, but is somewhat limiting: it highlights Synology’s expertise, but only for those in the market for camera security.
American dominance
Gabriël Henriëtte, Key Account Manager in the Netherlands, is given the mission of presenting Synology once more as a ‘one-stop shop’, but this time from the perspective of office productivity.
Can you really feel at ease in this context if you put your data in the public cloud?
Gabriël Henriëtte, Key Account Manager Netherlands
“Probably everyone has felt it especially strongly this year,” Henriëtte begins. “Geopolitical risks are rising and AI is rapidly changing the way companies work.” According to him, European companies spend 264 billion euros a year on cloud infrastructure and software from American companies. Three American hyperscalers dominate 70 percent of European cloud infrastructure, and prices of cloud and software services are rising by ten percent a year on average.
Giving away the basket
American cloud providers also fall under American legislation such as the Cloud Act, regardless of where the data is physically located. “That means they are legally obliged to hand over data when federal agencies ask for it,” says Henriëtte. According to him, in the second half of 2025 the American government submitted more than 5,500 data requests to Microsoft, and more than 60,000 to Google.
“Can you really feel at ease in this context if you put your data in the public cloud?” he wonders. “We all know you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Anyone who puts all their productivity in the public cloud puts everything in one basket and, on top of that, gives that basket away.”
Productivity under your own control
Synology counters this with Synology Office Suite, a productivity suite that runs as a private cloud on your own NAS. “From file storage and collaboration to email and chat: all your data stays on your NAS,” says Henriëtte. “Most vendors sell either hardware without software, or SaaS solutions that fall short on data governance. We offer software, hardware and governance as one ecosystem that you can use straight out of the box.”
Drive handles file management and file sharing. In Office, multiple users work on documents, spreadsheets and presentations at the same time, which can be converted to Microsoft formats. MailPlus, Calendar and Contacts take over email and calendars. ChatPlus and Meet provide chat and video meetings. AI features help draft texts, summarise emails and translate meetings live, and in Drive you search for files in natural language.
Synology supports the suite with its own hardware that, with backup and high availability, can handle thousands of users. Henriëtte shows a reference architecture with two clusters in Synology High Availability and Hyper Backup for disaster recovery. “If your organisation has thousands or even tens of thousands of users, IT scales up Meet’s capacity flexibly according to actual need,” he says.
Listening ears
Sovereignty is a core argument for Synology, with the definition of the term relating mainly to control of the data. After all, Synology itself is a Taiwanese company, as is the software.
Combined with the argument that Synology takes care of everything, both in office software and in video security, the company has a story that resonates. The Kinepolis cinema hall at the Jaarbeurs, where the speakers tell their story, is certainly full.
Revolutionary step
Data storage remains Synology’s core specialty, of course. Ou highlights how the company’s systems have by now thoroughly outgrown even the broadest definition of a NAS. She does so by discussing the new PAS7700. This 4U server is no lightweight.
“We designed the PAS7700 around NVMe from start to finish,” says Ou. “As storage medium we use U.3 NVMe SSDs, and the protocol is NVMe over Fabrics too. From the storage to the software layer, everything is NVMe, and that delivers speed.”
The PAS7700 is an all-flash system for critical workloads such as virtual machines, databases, EDA applications for chip design and AI storage. In Synology’s lab, the server reaches up to two million IOPS on random 4K reads and a throughput of 30 GB/s, with latency under one millisecond. The network goes up to 100 Gbps.
“If I want to explain that to my CEO, random reads and latency mean little to him,” Ou admits. So she compares the PAS7700 with the FlashStation FS6400. “The PAS7700 is three times as powerful,” she says. Ou calls that a revolutionary step in Synology’s enterprise storage portfolio.
Availability management
Availability is an additional asset. To that end, Synology recently launched the Continuous Availability Manager, which works perfectly with the Active-Active Dual Controller on the PAS7700.
In short: this device (or other systems) keeps running seamlessly, even during updates or a fault in one controller, and administrators can neatly configure and monitor that via a new interface.
4 pillars
All of the above is meant to highlight the enterprise credentials, but Synology can’t resist bringing up SMBs again. “We talk about enterprise all the time, but we haven’t forgotten the SMBs, who also need reliability and performance,” says Ou. That is why a smaller and more cost-efficient 2U model with a SATA architecture is coming. That device hits the market in January 2027.
Finally, no Synology Solution Day can pass without mention of ActiveProtect. This solution, built purely for backup, now also supports Proxmox.
Chiang already set out that line at the opening of the day. “It runs from storage and data management through data protection to even video surveillance for physical security,” he said. “That is what Synology stands for today.” With Henriëtte’s office software added, those are the four pillars Synology puts forward at the Solution Day.
Mission critical vs. enterprise
The portfolio becomes more complete year after year, and Synology’s enterprise story is gaining traction. We see large customers who have embraced Synology hardware, although in the Benelux region they are still somewhat rare. For instance, Korean Air has embraced Synology as an all-round player for office productivity: not a small player, but far from home.
The best local examples are still those of mid-sized companies, such as the St. Nikolaus hospital in Eupen. Smaller players with high requirements also feature, such as Ethos Media, which handles the social media coverage of the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps and needs a solution that supports collaborative video editing.
There are still customers and partners who think Synology only offers SMB solutions.
Danlin Ou,Presales Manager Synology
Of course, there are large customers in the Benelux, such as Shell. Still, a bit of a balancing act remains. At the Solution Day, Synology says it is suited to mission critical and enterprise. The first argument is the most relevant, because small companies also need hardware for critical workloads.
Don’t underestimate SMBs
Dan Lehman, AI Engineer at start-up Ocuma, even gets time for a presentation on how his company relies on Synology to develop software for detecting potential drownings in public swimming pools. That is certainly critical, but it has little to do with enterprise.
That Synology wants to play, and partly already does, at the level of enterprise players may well be a good thing. By international standards, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are SMB countries. We are not convinced that a focus on the very largest companies is the company’s most relevant strength in our market. Being seen as an SMB player is moreover no insult but a strength, certainly when you can support the most critical workloads of those SMBs, as Synology once again demonstrates at this event.