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My introduction to Synology DiskStation DS214


DataGrowth
Data growth visualization

In these times no household can be without ‘Home IT’ completely with a ‘home data center’. The figures for business data growth are at least equally applicable to the home situation, al least!

As in probably many situations, we started out with just some loose PC’s, which could be hooked up to The Internet, and after some time, also could be hooked up to one another. Gradually a fileserver was introduced because files were always on some other computer than you would need them. This made for a nice status quo, until the introduction of tablet computers and what not…

Now it was no longer so easy to access files or do whatever you wanted or needed, space was becoming scarcer by the day. Plus, our trusted old fileserver was starting to decay. I need to intervene. With a ‘data center’ just existing of a router a WiFi Accespoint, a central printer, some old and some newer workstations and tablets and this trusted old fileserver, an exchange wouldn’t be a daunting task…

A few years back I came across a company called Synology. I met some product guru of them and somehow registered the product name. Lately some of my colleagues started working with Synology in their home IT, so I decided this would be the way to go!

As I was running a fileserver with just a 100 Gigs of storage it was not hard to findBarracuda something with a bit more capacity. And the decision finally wasn’t too hard indeed.

A Synology DS (DiskStation) 214play it had to be and I decided upon 2 hard disks of 4 TB (Seagate Barracuda ST4000DM000) in a S.M.A.R.T. mirror setup.

Okay, so decision made, product purchased, product setup (which was just made too easy by all the discovery tooling). Disks setup in RAID 1 and on with the show!

And now the discovery fun begins…

DiskInsertsIt appears Synology has made 9 apps (for iPad / iPhone) that do all kinds of things!

  • DS Cloud, for your personal cloud solution
  • DS Mobile, monitor and manage download tasks on your DS
  • DS Finder, find Disk Stations and manage them (even remotely)
  • DS Photo, manage and view your photo collection
  • DS Cam, turn your DS into a video surveillance server
  • DS Download, to download anything you want (but mostly movies of course)
  • DS File, find files and anything else
  • DS Video, stream video anywhere
  • DS Audio, stream audio anywhere

So, okay, this is a bonus already! Just place files in the correct folder and your in business!

Currently I am migrating data towards the DS having first enabled some of the many apps inside the station, like:

  • Anti Virus
  • Java
  • iTunes Server
  • Mail Server (need to look into this, with many accounts with as many providers mail in a menace!)

Okay, well, these are just a few, but I fear there are MANY more apps out there!

Actually, from opening the box until being in business it took me 2 hours. Having a first run of customization down took me another 2 hours.

I guess doing the rest of the stuff

  • Hooking onto CrashPlan and possible MindTime
  • Getting VPN set up
  • Being able to access the DS over The Internet
  • Figuring out automatic movie download
  • Getting iTunes Server hooked up and running

will take me some hours still, but hey, this is more or less classifiable as hobby or at least additional functionality!

Some other things I heard / saw a DS was used for:DS214Play

  • Content Management server
  • Database server
  • Directory server
  • DNS server
  • ERP system
  • Forum host
  • GIT server
  • Online shop
  • Python
  • Website host
  • Wiki host
  • WordPress host

So, in the end, all is good now, we got plenty of space, a lot of new functionality. I would say, ‘Yay Synology’!