At Computex 2026, Synology highlighted arguably the most consistent product step in its 25-year history: the PAS7700, the company’s first active-active, all-flash NVMe enterprise storage system. The platform reached general availability a few weeks before the show and took place at Synology’s booth in Taipei, finally allowing the company to address critical workloads it has historically left to others.
For Middle Eastern buyers, the presentation comes with a bigger story. In a talk at Synology’s Computex booth, Synology’s General Sales Manager for the Middle East, Mike Chen, gave us an overview of what the company is doing in the region and gave us a rare insight into where Synology fits, where it doesn’t, and why patience is a strategy.
A flagship designed for workloads that Synology has not traditionally pursued
PAS7700 is definitely a new chapter. While Synology’s existing FS, RS and SA series cater to small and medium-sized businesses with strong reliability and famously well-designed software, the PAS7700 is designed for organizations that simply cannot tolerate downtime.
The system uses a dual-controller, active-active architecture in a 4U chassis with 48 U.3 NVMe SSD slots. Expandable via seven expansion units, the platform boasts 1.65 PB of raw capacity across 216 drives. Each controller can be paired with up to 1 TB of RAM (2 TB total), and the system supports both file and block storage protocols—NVMe-oF, iSCSI, Fiber Channel, SMB, and NFS—with four 100GbE ports, twelve 25GbE ports, and 16G Fiber Channel connectivity.
Performance headlines are highlighted: up to 2 million IOPS, sub-millisecond latency and 30 GB/s throughput – nearly three times the performance of existing Synology platforms. Built-in 3-2-1-1 data replication is part of the system’s security posture, and the company has been quietly validating the platform in real-world enterprise proof applications for the better part of a year since its general availability.
“The PAS7700 is our first flagship unit to enter the real enterprise market,” Mike told us at the booth. “It’s specifically designed for mission-critical workloads.”
The PAS7700 sits at the top of the new PAS series, alongside the PAS3600, as a Tier 2 option, complementing rather than replacing Synology’s existing RS, SA, and FS lines. The supporting staff at Computex was also strong: the new generation of DiskStation Manager (DSM 7.4) introduced in June, the new DP5200 and DP7400 ActiveProtect appliances, the improved ActiveProtect Manager 2.0, which now includes AWS EC2, Azure VM, ProxmoAHV and Workix-AIV with Google, anomaly and malware detection, plus updates to the control ecosystem, Office Suite and Bee Series private cloud.
The “DE-Cloud” moment in the Middle East
Here the conversation became more interesting than the technical table. Mike’s reading in the region—based on what he’s seen on the ground—has changed the way Middle Eastern organizations think about the cloud.
“The market, users in the Middle East are becoming more of a digital transformation mindset,” he said. “People actually wanted to have data in their own company. The cloud has been very popular for the last five, ten years, but people are starting to realize that having the cloud (data) in someone else’s home can be a little risky.”
He calls it DE-Cloud – deliberately moving data back to on-premises infrastructure. Not a wholesale change of the cloud era, but a hybrid recalibration. “Projects with large capacity storage requirements want to clean the data available on the NAS from the cloud on the NAS,” he said. “The hybrid mode is still very popular. They can’t move everything from the cloud all at once. It has to be a very gradual approach, for sure. But we’re seeing that more and more.”
The growth model is steady, not explosive. Synology’s largest recent deal in the region was a US$280,000 (~AED1,028,300) project – oil company, data protection, domestic. By enterprise storage standards, that’s a modest figure, but Mike was clear about the trajectory: “We’re seeing more and more projects coming in at this price range, more often.”
Vertically, the activity is in industries that handle large volumes of data and value sovereignty. In the UAE, this means natural resources, hospitality and government. Oil, mining and government again in Saudi and Kuwait. The targets in Mike’s frames are mega-accounts, not the traditional small business audience that built Synology’s name. “If we could just own one of the departments and not the whole company, that would be great,” he said. “A department to use Synology, we would be happy.”
Quality, not quantity, and willingness to turn away partners
Synology’s regional development strategy is deliberately dependent on a small network of partners. Mike was direct about it: “Not many. Not just ten or twenty. Maybe five or three in each town, and they form very close relationships.”
This is unusual. Most sellers entering the Middle East are trying to expand their channels as quickly as possible. Mike’s logic is the opposite – a small group of high-quality system integrators, each with deep product knowledge and a direct link to Synology’s technical engineering team, will better protect the brand’s credibility than a large reseller base. According to him, close partners receive immediate responses from senior engineers and recommendations directly from Synology’s technical team.
He went further. Partners chasing rapid growth, he said, are not Synology’s target. “We’re not there for rapid growth. We’re there for sustainable growth. If any channel partner really stands for rapid growth, we’re sorry – maybe Synology isn’t it.” That’s a sentence you don’t often hear from a vendor sales leader, and it says a lot about how Synology thinks about its place in the regional market.
The identification process is methodical. Distributors tag vendors who move units, Synology approaches them, meets with them, and assesses whether there’s what Mike calls “chemistry” — a shared philosophy around data protection rather than transaction fulfillment. The model is first developed in the UAE and then replicated in other Gulf markets.
Going after Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace — on price and on-premises
One of the less discussed areas of Synology’s portfolio is its productivity suite – an internal mail server, office applications and collaboration tools, all running on the customer’s own NAS hardware. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace dominate the Middle East SMB market, but Mike was clear that Synology wanted a slice.
“Most companies use Office 365 and Google G Suite,” he said. “We want to win that market share. Our selling point: first, it’s cost-effective. There are no distributed licenses. Second, it’s completely local. Completely private, fully in-house. Those are our two biggest pitches.”
The next-generation DSM comes alongside Computex announcements with AI-powered features in its productivity suite, including translation and email layout. Mike was more candid about Synology’s stance on AI: “Synology has AI, but it’s not very rich right now. We know that.”
The frame is important. Synology doesn’t pretend to compete with hyperscale AI offerings. The AI it’s sending aims to make customers’ data already more usable—search, translate, compile—rather than chasing the LLM and GPU narrative that the rest of the industry is racing against. For SMBs that have been quietly collecting Microsoft 365 and Google licenses for a decade, an efficient, on-premise alternative with the help of lightweight AI is a different conversation and reliable.
Honest about where Synology is and isn’t
Several points in the conversation were distinguished by their sincerity. On the regional surveillance market dominated by Hikvision: “I don’t want to compete with Hikvision because the difference is too big. I will compete where they can’t, which is data storage.” Synology has its own surveillance cameras and a full video surveillance ecosystem, but Mike is content to play in the background in the Middle East – providing storage for footage rather than directly pursuing the smart camera segment.
On brand awareness in the region: “It’s still very, very early. It’s not a big name yet. It gives us motivation to broadcast the brand more.” He cited Synology’s deployment of the Museum of the Future as an example of its pioneering MEA, and said the company is doing more — though he was clear about how slowly it’s going. “It’s a very long process to get them to let us use their name and write the content. It’s hard — a lot of persuasion.”
On the production-environment question—whether Middle Eastern enterprises should consider running their core workloads on Synology storage—he was honest about Synology’s current scope. “We don’t have a global service infrastructure yet. So we don’t want to put Synology into a production environment yet. We want to be the backend, protecting all the data.”
This classification is worth mastering. Even with the launch of the PAS7700, Mike’s framework positions Synology — at least for now — as a secure, cost-effective storage layer that supports enterprise IT, rather than a primary platform for production workloads. For the SMB and SMB mid-market who are buying on the basis of cost and reliability, this is the perfect fit. For very large enterprises, Synology admits that only the PAS7700 is earlier than the product story might suggest.
A package for Middle East IT buyers
Computex 2026 is a milestone for Synology. The PAS7700 takes the company into territory it has never seriously contested before, and its broader portfolio – DSM 7.4, ActiveProtect, surveillance and productivity lines – points to a meaningfully more complete vendor. But Mike’s reading of the regional market is a more telling story. According to him, the Middle East is in the early stages of a deliberate move away from fully cloud architectures towards hybrid and on-premises positions. Government, energy, hospitality – sectors that take data sovereignty seriously are leading the trend.
For MEA buyers evaluating their storage and data protection strategy this year, Synology’s offering is patient, disciplined, and refreshingly self-aware. It is not trying to be the first vendor of AI. It’s not trying to replace Microsoft 365 overnight. It strives to be the internal data layer for an increasingly sovereignty-conscious region, backed by a partner channel small enough to truly serve customers and a product roadmap that with the PAS7700 finally meets the most demanding enterprise workloads.
Asked to name five things Synology is great at, Mike’s list came up almost unedited: “Very good reliability. Packed with features. Protect your data. Cheap price. Very good support.” Each of these is bad. None of that sounds like the marketing language of 2026. But for the Middle East market, which is increasingly tired of cloud accounts and increasingly serious about data ownership, the unusual may be exactly the right position.
