This week, Synology formally launched its C2 backup service with a new North America cloud region. While the company first opened its managed backup infrastructure service in Frankfurt (largely due to EU data privacy), there was always a small challenge: distance. For the company’s North American customers, the data center was across an ocean which means there are relatively increased latency and bandwidth constraints. While backup is not the most latency-sensitive application, it is still one that there is a demonstratable difference between near and far backup targets. With this new service location, Synology hopes to improve performance.
Synology Opens C2 Backup Cloud Region for North America
We covered a bit of this in 2019’s piece: Synology Outlines 2020 Strategy in NYC. The company. The Synology C2 service is effectively a cloud backup service that adds functionality to the company’s on-prem NAS devices. The backup service includes deduplication and compression and includes data transfer.
The service has two plans. The first one provides up to 11 versions through 30 days of files (versioning does not count towards data usage) and can go from 100GB to 1TB. Plan I has three options but Plan II starts at 1TB and adds additional features such as data deduplication. The below pricing is in Euro, but the US pricing is the same number in $USD making it less expensive based on exchange rates as of this publication offering an 11%-12% effective discount.
Another interesting use case of C2 storage that the company talked about at its show was the concept of Hybrid Share. There, a large data set could be stored using C2. Then, a local Synology NAS device could cache data. This way users could still have access to the full data set, even with a small capacity on-site NAS. If one imagines a small creative studio where people are working in their homes these days, Hybrid Share would allow all media assets to be loaded into a single shared folder, but then the most relevant digital assets cached locally on their local NAS.
Thre is another aspect to the Synology C2 product, its partner portal. Synology specifically has C2 Partner Portal capabilities to help Synology partners manage their customers. Synology also provides a discount as part of its partner program.
This is one of those areas where Synology is adding some class-leading capabilities.
Final Words
One could legitimately argue that they can create similar solutions using colocation and self-built NAS units for less. Synology’s typical customers do not want that hassle and enjoy this is an easy-to-deploy and integrated solution. Synology is going beyond just a direct to small business/ consumer model here and is also enabling a partner ecosystem.
The new C2 service is located in Seattle, Washington. For those on the east coast of the US or Canada, that will still be a non-trivial distance. Being in Seattle Synology also gets access to connectivity routes to Asia through undersea fiber runs that terminate there. At some point, Synology will need to add an Asia C2 regional offering to bring down latencies even further. For now, adding the Seattle region will help users in much of Asia get access to the service at lower latencies than they could in Europe. For a business that needs to store data in both the EU and the US, one can use Frankfurt or Seattle regions to find costs.
Overall, this is a next-gen step in Synology’s plan to offer value-added services atop its existing on-prem NAS portfolio both for customers and partners.
