"Synology's DSM is now a more capable and mature OS."
Great. So hopefully it'll fix the file access issue it created a few versions back. The bastards.
Synology has radically improved DSM, the operating system of its NAS (filer) products for smaller businesses and home users, boosting virtualisation, performance, protection, and package features, and even adding Apple Watch support. DSM 6.0 gets 64-bit support, meaning enhanced performance. Future DiskStations and …
Considering they're one of if not the front runner on the NAS OS front it seems pretty daft to me they don't offer a purchased version for none standard hardware.
I've been using it on a HP NAS for years now and have zero incentive to buy their hardware just for the support. Offer me a pay for version though and I'll snap their hands off.
Except for the part where the DRBD-based replication is A) a pain in the ASCII to set up and B) not terribly reliable. It's way - way - better than it was, but still nowhere near as reliable as HCI.
Now, if Synology would drop DRBD and switch to LizardFS we could talk. They'd have a reliable scale out storage infrastructure underneath and we could then use the containerized/KVMed DSM on top.
The DSM isn't bad. In fact, I love the DSM. The problem is that as soon as you want HA or the ability to scale beyond one node's worth of storage Synology just isn't good enough.
Maybe in Synology 7 they'll adopt LizardFS. Of course, by then, open sourced HCI solutions like NodeWeaver will have incorporated not only Docker support, but integrated SMB/NFS file support so we won't NEED Synology anymore...