Synology Takes Aim at the Enterprise with New Backup Appliance

Summary

Synology has launched ActiveProtect, a backup appliance aimed at the enterprise market. This move marks a significant shift for the company, traditionally known for its SMB offerings. While the appliance offers robust features like air-gapping, immutability, and deduplication, experts question its competitiveness in a market dominated by established players and cloud-based services.

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Main Story

So, Synology, you know, the folks who’ve been killing it with network-attached storage for smaller businesses, they’ve just made a pretty big move. They’ve officially jumped into the enterprise market with their new ActiveProtect backup appliance.

It’s a bold step for them. It’s clear, they’re aiming to go head-to-head with the big dogs in enterprise backup and storage – companies like Dell and HPE. Thing is, this market is already pretty crowded. Many of the larger players, they’re heavily invested in hybrid cloud or cloud SaaS backup. Can Synology really break through?

Their ActiveProtect line is launching with three different appliances. First there’s the DP7400, built for data centers, and then you’ve got the DP340 and DP320, the slightly smaller ones, meant for edge backups. Each of these appliances, they’re powered by Synology’s own ActiveProtect Manager OS. And they support a huge range of workloads: think VMware, Hyper-V, NetApp, you name it. You can even back up your Microsoft 365 stuff, your Oracle databases, things like that.

What features are we talking about? Well, they include key backup features like air-gapping, immutability, and deduplication. And you can integrate these appliances with cloud storage, including Synology’s own C2 Cloud Storage or any S3-compatible platform. Pretty standard stuff, honestly.

This launch is part of a much larger plan, apparently. Synology wants to grow their enterprise offerings in 2025. They’ve said they’re planning to release two more high-performance, scale-out storage products later this year. That’s something. William Davis, Synology’s VP of enterprise sales, he said one of the big differentiators with ActiveProtect is the simplified licensing model. See, you get a license that covers backing up workloads to three backup servers. And then, you can add licenses for larger deployments – without having to pay per workload which is always welcome.

Still, there’s a sense of skepticism, and rightly so. I saw a report from Jerome Wendt, CEO of Data Center Intelligence Group. He isn’t totally convinced that Synology is going to make a huge dent in the market straight away. He points out that the really big enterprises – those with over a thousand employees – they usually have established hybrid cloud or cloud SaaS solutions. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Plus, Wendt’s raising a good point about whether Synology can keep up with the rapid updates and hardware refreshes that the established vendors provide, especially given the constant evolution of ransomware threats.

And it’s true, the big players are always adding features and refining their products; it’s not just about the appliance. Is that incentive enough for a large enterprise to make the switch? Is it enough to leave their current, more mature solutions? I’m not so sure. It’s something we all have to think about.

It seems to me, that ActiveProtect may be a good fit for SMBs as they grow into smaller enterprises, or businesses needing a bit of extra storage. But, their success in the wider enterprise space is still an open question. Synology has a really good reputation in the SMB world. That might actually be a hurdle for them though. Competing with the big boys, and with the trend towards cloud-based backups, is definitely going to be a challenge.

Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see if this enterprise push from Synology really resonates with bigger organizations. Or maybe, it’ll just serve as a bridge for their current SMB customers. Only time will tell, I guess. One thing is for sure, though, things are getting interesting!