Synology launches enterprise push with a backup appliance
Synology attempts to court the enterprise IT market with the launch of ActiveProtect, a new backup appliance, and plans to expand storage offerings later this year.
Synology is expanding beyond its traditional SMB market to target larger enterprises with its new ActiveProtect appliance line.
The ActiveProtect line combines Synology's hardware and software and is available now.
This is the first of several enterprise-focused products arriving this year from the backup and storage vendor, which has traditionally sold to SMBS.
Synology expects to launch other large enterprise focused offerings in 2025, including two products focused on high-performance, scale-out storage, according to the vendor.
However, Synology's focus on consumers and SMBs means it will take time for the vendor to catch up with many enterprise backup and storage market leaders like Dell Technologies and HPE, said Jerome Wendt, CEO and principal analyst at Data Center Intelligence Group.
An appliance may provide continuity or storage headroom for SMBs that are growing into a smaller enterprise, but many established enterprises with more than 1,000 employees are already using hybrid cloud or cloud SaaS backup services, he said.
A backup appliance is nice, but is it a compelling argument to switch from [the services] you're using?
Jerome WendtCEO and Principal Analyst, Data Center Intelligence Group
SaaS services or long-established enterprise IT vendors may offer more frequent software updates or hardware refreshes, which are important considerations when hardening an organization's cybersecurity against evolving ransomware attacks, Wendt said.
"A backup appliance is nice, but is it a compelling argument to switch from [the services] you're using?" he said. "If you need all those latest and greatest features, they're probably not in this product."
Enterprise growth for 2025
The ActiveProtect line includes three appliances, the DP7400 for the data center and the smaller DP340 or DP320 for backups at the edge. Each appliance also includes ActiveProtect Manager, an operating system for backups developed by Synology.
At launch, supported workloads include VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, NetApp OnTap, Nutanix Files, Microsoft 365 services, Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, among others. Backup capabilities include air-gapping, immutability and deduplication with the ability to connect to cloud storage services such as Synology's C2 Cloud Storage or other S3-compatible clouds.
Synology wants to minimize the need for complex licensing, a particular pain point for SMB customers growing into an enterprise, said William Davis, vice president of enterprise sales and marketing at the company.
ActiveProtect customers can back up workloads in up to three backup servers with the included license, Davis said. Additional licenses are available for multi-appliance deployments, but customers are not charged per workload. The vendor will sell an additional premium support service for ActiveProtect customers.
"People do not want to pay for licensing," he said. "We want to make it easy to not just deploy, but procure."
The launch of ActiveProtect marks a new enterprise push for Synology, but the vendor's spread of products will remain focused on storage and backup over data management or other IT services, Davis said.
"We're going to focus on a handful of solutions to make sure we do it right," he said.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
