Posted by Taipei, Taiwan: Synology announced the beta release of DiskStation Manager (DSM) 7.1 on Wednesday. The company said the new product will offer system admins a chance to test out the expanded functionality.
DSM 7.1 beta is built further on DSM 7.0’s major platform upgrade and comes with many new enhancements designed to address IT challenges, according to Synology.
“DSM 7.1 is an important evolution for one of the most widely used data management platforms in the industry,” Synology’s System Product Management team manager Shamrock Ko said.
“Building on the solid foundation we set with 7.0, we can now focus on addressing the more specific challenges that our customers identify during their day-to-day use of the platform,” added Ko.
Core storage enhancements
On the storage management experience front, DSM 7.1 has made key improvements. It has introduced file aggregation portals that adds SMB DFS capability to enable administrators to link together multiple Synology systems. This provides more easy file access to end-users without the need to remember separate addresses.
The new user interface introduced in 7.0 has been further optimised with the consolidation of background tasks giving an administrator-friendly overview. It provides greater transparency into what is happening on the system, even across different user accounts.
For Synology High Availability clusters, users can now view and manage drives on both systems from a single instance of Storage Manager for easier maintenance and management.
On the performance side, DSM has long supported flash caching to boost random I/O performance cost-effectively. This new version will further economize SSD caching with the ability to speed up multiple storage volumes at the same time.
Full system protection
DSM 7.1 introduces complete, bare-metal level backups of the entire system. Synology Active Backup for Business enables the ability to clone and replicate the entire Synology system vastly and it also pushes recovery time objectives (RTO) in case of a total site failure. However, the full system restoration capability helps to quickly and conveniently deploys identically configured systems as well.
Ecosystem-wide improvements
In tandem with DSM 7.1, Synology is launching several major enhancements to applications and services.
- Active Backup for Business: bandwidth control, expanded monitoring and reporting capabilities, and support for DSM backups
- Active Insight: centralised login activity monitoring and Hyper Backup task statuses
- Synology C2 Hybrid Share: server-side snapshots for better file protection
- Directory Server: support for read-only domain controllers to improve deployment security and flexibility
- Synology Drive: revamped mobile user experience and improved monitoring/auditing capabilities
- MailPlus: Virtual DSM support, expanded management options, importing and migration improvements
- Virtual Machine Manager: storage I/O performance improvements and QoS capabilities
“Our constantly evolving DSM platform keeps adding capabilities to both new and existing deployments,” said Weili Lu, Product manager – DSM, Synology.
“The pre-release program provides a chance for us to work closely with our customers, providing early access to new features and obtaining valuable feedback in return,” added Lu.
Synology said that DSM 7.1 beta along with supporting applications and services will be available from today via its pre-release program. Users interested can install the pre-release software on non-production or virtualized systems.