Synology UC3200: Active-Active IP SAN for Mission-Critical Environments
Synology UC3200 and Active-Active Storage for IT with no downtime
As businesses move into 2025 and 2026, their expectations for how long systems will be up have changed a lot. Mission-critical apps, virtualized workloads, and transactional systems now need to be available all the time, even when hardware fails or maintenance is going on. These expectations are often not met by traditional active-passive storage architectures. The Synology Unified Controller UC3200 was made to solve this problem by providing an active-active IP SAN architecture that is perfect for environments with almost no downtime.
The UC3200 was released earlier in the decade, but it is still very useful for businesses today that value availability, consistent performance, and easy operations.
Active-Active Architecture for Always Being Available
The UC3200’s active-active dual-controller design is what sets it apart. In the UC3200, both controllers actively handle I/O traffic at the same time, unlike systems where a standby controller stays idle until it fails. This design gets rid of single-controller bottlenecks and makes sure that service continues even if one controller goes down.
Non-Transparent Bridge technology lets controllers switch over without affecting connected hosts. In real-world business settings, this means that virtual machines and applications can always access storage, even when controllers break down or are being worked on.
This level of resilience is necessary, not just nice to have, for businesses that have workloads that are always on.
How to Make Virtualized Workloads Work Well and Be Reliable
The UC3200 has Intel Xeon processors and ECC memory on each controller, which lets it handle heavy iSCSI workloads with reliability and consistency. Aggregated network performance supports high IOPS delivery, which makes the platform good for virtualization clusters, databases, and transactional systems.
The built-in 10GbE connection supports multiple network paths and link aggregation, which makes the system faster and more reliable. More options for expanding networks let businesses match their storage throughput to the needs of modern high-speed networks.
Resilient cache protection keeps cached data in sync between controllers, which lowers the chance of losing data if one controller fails before writes are saved to disk.
Storage that can grow without causing problems
The UC3200 can handle more storage space by adding expansion units directly to it. This lets businesses add more storage space without having to stop working. This modular approach fits well with the way data is growing from 2025 to 2026, when storage needs are steadily rising because of analytics, retention policies, and virtualization sprawl.
Plug-and-play expansion keeps performance and availability high while making operations less complicated. Redundant power supplies and components that can be replaced while the system is running make it even less likely that service will be interrupted while hardware is being serviced.
Made for platforms that allow enterprise virtualization
Virtualization is still a key part of the IT strategy for businesses. The UC3200 works with all of the major hypervisors and supports application-aware snapshots and better iSCSI path management.
As businesses keep moving their workloads to virtual platforms, it’s important that shared storage is reliable. The active-active design of the UC3200 makes sure that virtual machines are always accessible, even when there are problems at the controller level. This meets strict uptime and recovery needs.
This feature is especially useful for businesses that use virtualized infrastructure to run applications that make money or serve customers.
At the storage layer, security and data protection
Modern businesses also need to think about data security as well as availability. The UC3200 supports self-encrypting drives, which means that hardware-level encryption can be done without slowing down the system. Separating the operating system from data volumes lowers the risk even more during system events.
The ability to take snapshots and make copies of data makes it easy to recover quickly from logical failures, accidental deletions, or ransomware attacks. In 2025–26, quick recovery is just as important as stopping threats.
Strategic Role in IT Architectures from 2025 to 2026
The UC3200 is best used as a centralized iSCSI storage platform for mission-critical workloads in modern enterprise architectures. It works with virtualization clusters, transactional databases, and application stacks that need to be up all the time because downtime hurts business.
But setting up an active-active SAN takes a lot of thought. To get the most out of the platform, network design, multipathing configuration, backup integration, and capacity planning must all work together.
About the Epis technology
Epis Technology helps businesses design, set up, and support storage environments that are very reliable and run on Synology platforms like the UC3200. The company focuses on Synology consulting and support, enterprise storage architecture, backups for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, fully managed PC backups, and planning for business continuity. Epis Technology helps businesses design active-active storage systems, connect them to virtualization platforms, and make sure that availability, performance, and data protection meet the needs of modern businesses.