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GEN designs, supplies and maintains Synology storage for businesses, charities, schools and public sector bodies across the UK. RackStation arrays in a comms room, DiskStations in branch offices, replication between sites, and the backup estate that hangs off all of it. Synology is the only Network Attached Storage vendor we deploy, and we run our own production storage on it, which is a rather different proposition from a reseller who has read the datasheet.
Support is chargeable engineering work at our published rates, with no contract and no minimum term. If you are looking for free help with a NAS at home, this is not that service, and the Synology support site will serve you far better.
We work for organisations, not households. That includes the small end: a four bay DiskStation holding the shared drive for a six person office is a business system, and we support it exactly as seriously as a twelve bay RackStation in a data centre, because the accounts, the case files and the drawings are on it either way.
What we do not do is domestic support. If the device is a two bay unit in a spare room holding films and family photographs, our rates will not represent value to you, and we would rather say so plainly than take the money. Synology's own support and the community forums are excellent, and they cost nothing.
Whether a volume has dropped, a DSM upgrade has stranded a package, replication to your second site has quietly stopped, or you simply need the estate looked at properly by somebody who knows it, our specialists pick the case up and stay with it.
Cover is available pre-pay or pay as you go, at service levels from a next business day response through to a thirty minute guaranteed response 24 hours a day. We are a Synology Partner, we run Synology at scale for our own storage and replication, and we hold spares rather than waiting on a distributor. Infrastructure maintenance and monitoring can be wrapped around the same hardware so faults are found before anybody reports them.
Fault work on production storage, taken by an engineer who has run the same equipment in anger
Specified against the workload rather than the price list, then built, racked and handed over documented
Keeping the estate healthy between incidents, which is where most of the value sits
For immediate support head over to the HelpDesk and raise a ticket, or to discuss maintenance and service pricing please contact us.
With so many years invested in the Synology ecosystem, both internally and for our clients, we carry a large number of Synology spares and parts in stock from complete units, through to power supplies, backplanes, mainboards, and we're able to carry out component level repairs on some models. Where equipment has passed out of vendor support we can usually keep it running: see legacy system support for what that involves.
The higher end RackStations provide a power efficient, rock solid and highly scalable solution. There are clearly defined upgrade paths both in capacity and performance as your needs grow. Internally, we use RackStations to provide both internal storage, as well as block and file level storage for our virtualisation platforms. High availability is available and reliable for mission critical storage and services.
Synology RackStations are incredibly reliable and flexible, designed and manufactured to the highest standards, and they aren't cheap for that very reason, but in the industry you can't get better.
Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) is a powerful and feature rich operating system that provides a comprehensive selection of built in services all accessible from a beautifully designed web interface. For a business this matters commercially: a good deal of what would otherwise be separately licensed server software is already paid for in the chassis.
DNS, a fully featured bind9 DNS implementation can be enabled with a few clicks, and config/zones can be managed from the command line, or via the GUI
Calendar and Contacts, nicely implemented as iCal and CardDAV servers, ready to centralise your organisation's scheduling and contacts. By implementing these industry standard protocols, code can easily synchronise these datasets between corporate servers and devices.
Antivirus, is provided at no charge to regularly scan filesystems and take corrective actions
Backup, both Hyper Backup for backing up or synchronising data between servers, or Active Backup for Business which provides endpoint backup services for remote computers, servers, shares and even VMware and Hyper-V
LDAP, allowing centralisation of authentication that can automatically sync between Synology servers, and other LDAP compatible systems. Combine this with RADIUS support to expand this authentication framework to a far larger selection of devices such as routers, VPN appliances and more. Single sign-on and OAuth takes this to another level with token based single sign-on for your applications.
Docker, providing container services directly on the RackStation, with easy to use configuration, monitoring and management.
File Station, a nicely designed web interface for browsing and accessing files stored on the NAS.
Security Advisor provides a periodic review of the RackStation's security settings and provides suggestions on improvements, a well designed and functional tool
Surveillance Station, a powerful and feature rich video surveillance solution, with support for up to 144 cameras, and a wide range of supported camera models
Storage Analyser generates periodic reports on storage usage, viewable by user, share, protocol, and so on, allowing easy management of storage without the need to impose quotas on users, which you can do if you wish.
Task scheduler allows the configuration of scheduled tasks that can run on flexible timescales.
Web station, a fully featured web server that can be set up and configured easily from the GUI
Virtual Machine Manager is yet another unexpected feature providing full virtualisation on the RackStation itself.
VPN Server, provides secure remote access to your network, with support for common VPN protocols
There are many more packages available for the Synology ecosystem including a vibrant third party selection, but remember, its linux, and if you need something not provided as an easily installed package, then you can install it yourself with dpkg.
If you need a NAS then you will probably need synchronisation, allowing the automated
copying of data from NAS to NAS, or server to NAS or many other possible configurations. At GEN we have
our core storage running on
two 12 bay NAS's with two 12 bay SAS expansions each running in high availability, with hourly
replications to another NAS server at a third site across the WAN. We then have other systems backing up
their data and images to these core NAS servers in the knowledge that we're going to replicate those
backups to a third site within the hour, and we can play with the retention settings so we keep a number
of versions both internally and externally.
In our fairly complex setup we have a mixture of rsync,
Active Backup, Time Machine, Git, and virtualisation all
moving data to and from the core NAS's with their 1 Petabyte of combined storage (at the time of writing).
The same pattern scales down comfortably to a single site with an off-site target, and it is the design most of our customers end up with. See GEN Storage if you would rather we held the second copy for you.
Synology has from their very inception aligned with GEN's core values, that being
Synology have a wide range of products, from the very small personal devices right through to enterprise grade storage solutions, many of which are used internally at GEN. In fact our very first Synology NAS was the DS101 back in 2004 and we still have this device on display in our head office.
Where an organisation would rather run the estate itself, we teach it. Three graded courses take an engineer from provisioning, DSM setup, storage pools and permissions, through protocols, VLANs, SSD cache, LDAP and RADIUS, to command line work, logs, filesystem tools, the DSM API, disaster recovery and high availability. Delivered remotely or on site. See Synology training for the course outlines.
No. GEN provides Synology support to businesses, charities, schools and public sector bodies only. We do not take on domestic installations, and we do not support a consumer NAS sitting in a home. If your Synology is a personal device, Synology's own support channels and the Synology community forums are the right place to start, and they are free. Our engineers are chargeable, and a home user is very rarely well served by paying commercial engineering rates.
No. Every hour our engineers spend on a Synology, whether that is a fifteen minute DSM question or a three day array recovery, is charged at our published rates, in GBP and exclusive of VAT. There is no free triage, no free diagnosis and no free advice line. What you get in exchange is a UK based specialist who owns the case, a guaranteed response time against your chosen service level, and a written record of everything done.
No. There is no support contract, no minimum term and no notice period. You place a sum on account and draw against it, or you settle on invoice. Hours you buy do not expire, and hours you do not use carry over. Our published rates set out the day, night and out of coverage charges in full.
The full business range: RackStation RS units and their RX and RXD expansion shelves, the SA and UC series, and the plus and value DiskStation models where they are deployed in an office, branch or edge role. We hold parts and working knowledge for hardware back to 2014, and we will take on earlier equipment where the customer accepts that spares are finite.
Yes. Degraded and failed SHR, SHR-2, RAID 1, 5, 6 and 10 arrays, Btrfs and ext4 volumes that will not mount, controller and backplane faults, and units that no longer boot. Recovery is specialist work charged by the hour with no guaranteed outcome, and the first thing we will tell you is to stop touching the unit. Where the array is beyond software recovery we will say so rather than run the meter.
Yes. DSM version upgrades across a fleet, package and database migrations, migration from an ageing DiskStation to a RackStation, and head unit swaps that preserve the storage pool. We test the upgrade path against the packages you actually run before touching production, because a DSM upgrade that strands a business critical package is not a success.
Yes, and a good part of our Synology work arrives that way. We audit what is there, document it, correct what is wrong, and take on maintenance from that point. We do not require the equipment to have been bought from us.
Yes. Cover runs 24 hours a day across five engineering shifts, with handovers conducted live between two engineers rather than passed as written notes. Emergency work carries a minimum charge of one hour and starts from the moment we accept the ticket.
Yes. We specify, supply, rack, configure and maintain Synology hardware, and we hold a substantial stock of spares including complete units, power supplies, backplanes and mainboards. For mission critical sites we will hold a cold spare configured and ready to swap.
The United Kingdom. Our engineers are in-house and UK based, our data centres are in the UK, and the specialist who takes your case is the specialist who works it. There is no offshore first line filtering the ticket before a technical person sees it.
Our engineers are UK based and in-house, with no offshore outsourcing: the specialist who takes your case is the specialist who works it, and they hold the production experience to match the equipment in front of them. Risk is assessed before anything is changed, the SAPR method is applied to every fault, and five shifts a day mean an overnight handover is a conversation between two engineers rather than a note left in a ticket. Our AI runs on our own hardware in our own data centres, and it never writes a word you read.
There is no support contract, no minimum term and no notice period. You buy hours at our published rates, use them when you need them, and what you do not use carries over. How GEN support works sets all of it out in full.
