CONVERGING data protection with storage is the motivation for Synology’s ActiveProtect solution. Released earlier this year, this new line of data protection appliances, moves away from traditional siloed systems of data management. It is now the main instrument in the company’s continued effort to streamline business operations and bolster data security.
“Data protection should empower businesses, not burden businesses,” Jia-Yu Liu, Executive Vice President at Synology, said, reflecting her organization’s intent to leverage its hardware and software expertise to meet evolving enterprise needs.
ActiveProtect consolidates enterprise backup software, server, and repository functions into a single appliance, simplifying the traditionally complex process of data protection. The company emphasizes the goal of empowering businesses rather than burdening them. This is consistent with Synology’s technology directions, such as DiskStation Manager (DSM), which has consistently prioritized a unified, user-centric approach to storage and application management.
Designed to provide comprehensive workload support, protecting various systems from PCs and Macs to virtual machines and Microsoft 365 services, all through a unified interface, ActiveProtect enhances productivity by simplifying management. The ActiveProtect Manager (APM) console is capable of monitoring up to 150,000 workloads or 2,500 sites, with the design focused on enterprise-grade scalability. It is also designed to work with and overcome the inherent complexities and inefficiencies of legacy backup infrastructures.
This scalability is achieved through efficient data indexing and metadata management, allowing for rapid querying and reporting across large datasets. Furthermore, the APM console leverages centralized policy management, enabling administrators to enforce consistent backup and recovery policies across the entire infrastructure.
Security is paramount, with the system offering immutable backups, air-gap capabilities, and regulatory compliance to defend against cyber threats. These features are critical in today’s landscape, where data breaches and ransomware attacks pose significant risks to businesses. Efficiency is also a key consideration, with the appliances delivering fast incremental backups and utilizing global source-side deduplication to reduce network load and storage needs. This ‘efficiency at scale’ is achieved through advanced data reduction techniques, such as global source-side deduplication. By eliminating redundant data blocks before transmission, ActiveProtect reduces network load by up to 99 percent and storage requirements by 50 percent.
The appliance’s fast incremental backups, achieved through change block tracking (CBT) technology, further optimize backup performance by only transferring changed data blocks, using sophisticated hashing algorithms and block-level comparisons, ensuring data integrity and minimizing performance overhead.
