We’re back and we took it up a notch! The breath-taking scenery of Franciacorta wine country witnessed the 2nd edition of Syneto Partner Gala Italy on Thursday, April 14. With a 20% increase in attendance, this edition brought together 120+ participants from 4 countries. It was an exciting one-day event where we talked about our past, present, and future projects. The event ended on a relaxing note with an appetising wine tasting and business lunch.

The Gala opened with a brief retrospective from our President, Marco Lorenzi. He outlined the efforts of a visionary team who made Syneto what it is today. We are a passionate team working to simplify the way organizations handle data growth. 400 customers worldwide prove that this is an enduring vision.

50 Shades Of IT – Enrico Signoretti

First to take the stage was renowned independent consultant, analyst, blogger and owner at juku.it, Enrico Signoretti. He provided an insightful view on upcoming storage technologies, with a focus on the most important trends in IT: Private vs. Public clouds, Big Data and the importance of containers.

The future: hybrid cloud, containers and more…

As Darwin famously put it: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change”. Like speciation, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to data management. Companies have different needs and we know this well. This is why we focus on creating solutions that evolve with our customers’ needs.

On this note, our new CEO, Vadim Comănescu, launched our new vision for the future: The Syneto Cloud Platform. It is a flexible hybrid-cloud approach which combines file services, VMs and Containers. This gives our customers access to the advantages of both the Private and the Public Cloud:

• High performance applications with low latency and sensitive data in the Private Cloud.
• Cold storage, data archiving and non-sensitive data in the Public Cloud.

One of the main evolutionary paths in IT has always been consolidation. This is just what Containers for virtualized applications do. They remove the need for multiple virtual operating systems, each consuming its fair share resources. What do our customers get? 15-30% more resources for their applications. We call that a good trade.

Greetings from across the ocean

Next up was Gaurang Mehta, CEO of SANS Technologies, our partner from the United States. He shared the particularities of the American market and what makes organisations over there choose Syneto. In a nutshell it’s: usability, low TCO and our analytics engine which make it easy to take data-driven decision.

Gaurang also focused on the differences between companies in America and those in Italy. The average American SMB has over 1000 employees and makes $100 million in business. The same company in Italy only has around 250 employees and a much smaller turnover.

Syneto hyper-converged solutions for the SMB market

We’ve looked at the future, but let’s turn to the present for a moment. Together with Dragos Chioran, our VP Marketing & Design, we took a hard look at the facts and figures of today’s data market.

The amount of data created and stored by companies around the world doubles every 2 years (more about this here). Because of this, 79% of IT managers state that handling storage growth is their main challenge. That’s not such a big deal for big enterprises with giant IT staffs and budgets. But what about the 99.6% of the companies on the planet that are SMBs? These organisations lack the resources of the larger ones. That’s what Syneto’s range of hyper-converged solutions were designed for.

In this segment, we analysed the disadvantages SMBs face with traditional “silo” architectures in their datacenter. As an alternative for SMBs Syneto is proposing a new approach: consolidate networking, servers and storage in a Private Cloud, hyper-converged solution.

Technical goodies

Our resident tech guru (who also happens to be the CTO), Dan Vatca, showcased our latest hardware and software innovations.

Syneto’s flagship product range, the ULTRASeries, received a powerful update which boosts performance and reliability:

• 2x better throughput and faster memory
• 10x increased reliability for the data write cache
• 2x more capacity for the data read cache
• 5x more IOPS for data cache writes

Not to be outdone on the software side, we also launched the latest version of our operating system: Syneto Storage OS 3. It fields a host of new upgrades which improve usability and security:

• Brand new, tablet-ready, interface for easy management
• At-a-glance key metrics on the dashboard
• Improved AFP Spotlight search capable of going through 6 mil. files in under 100 ms
• Enhanced HA with multipath iSCSI and 25% faster inter-node failover
• Tighter VMware integration with support for vSphere 6, VAAI and 10G vNICs
• Automated hardware mapping, SAS3 support and more…

The upgraded ULTRASeries with Storage OS 3 brings a 30% performance boost across the range. But don’t take our word for it, let the numbers do the talking:

Don’t take our word for it…

We invited 2 great companies to share their experience with Syneto and put some weight behind our words:

1. Silca, one of the world’s biggest key system manufacturers. They use Syneto data solutions for production-critical VMware storage and VDI, totalling 150TB of data.
2. Serioplast, Italy’s largest custom plastic packaging company. They use 22 Syneto ULTRASeries hyper-converged arrays for business-critical applications.

They wowed the audience with practical and real evidence on how their businesses run smoother with Syneto. In the words of Silca’s IT Manager: “Syneto: no more sleepless nights!”

Simple is always better

Alessandro Freddi, Country Manager ITA, presented the new and simplified Partner Program. It has only 2 levels: Gold and Platinum, and focuses more on the partner’s commitment as opposed to the old one, where the reseller’s level was determined by discounts. Partners can now easily move from one level to another by increasing their involvement in marketing and co-branded activities.

For more details, please take a look at the Partner Program Overview:

Download Partner Program Overview PDF

Enough business! Let’s party!

To wrap up this exciting day, we gave away three prizes to some of our lucky partners. We then moved to the inner courtyard and enjoyed a wine tasting and a lunch where ideas continued to flow.

We are grateful to all who made this event possible through their dedication and support!