From an enterprise end user's point of view...
::puts on asbestos underpants and wades into the fray::
This is not new or surprising behavior; ALL the enterprise storage companies do this. ALL OF THEM. And you know what? the end user business nominally does not care. What the business does care about (at least the one I work for) is data integrity, survivability, and the almighty support contract with the reassurances that it provides.
We have a couple QNAP appliances at [RedactedCo] for 'archival' purposes- it's data that the business wants to keep even if they hardly ever access it. those appliances shipped with no drives in them, so we populated them with 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives, which are on the HCL. We've had one drive fail so far, and it was a week or two for us to get Seagate to ship us a replacement. If the same thing happened on our Netapp or Nimble? A drive would have magically appeared by courier that day or overnight. The qnap appliances..... are not *quite* enterprise grade, but they would certainly work for a small to medium business, or for specific use cases.
I see this as Synology making a play to establish a foothold (or strengthen an existing foothold) in the already cutthroat enterprise sector, and TBH, if they are able to compete with the 'big boys' on support and service and some other offerings*, I'd welcome them with open arms.
* I.e., ship an 'enterprise' version of their firmware with most of the additional cruft and bloat disabled unless the storage admin specifically wants it enabled- that's one of the few gripes I have with the QNAP kit- It's a box of storage for us, we don't need a bloody app store, a three ring circus, and dancing bears with it..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
