Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review | ITPro

The ActiveProtect products signal a new direction for Synology as they’re designed to deliver a purpose-built backup appliance solution to mid-sized businesses and enterprises. Powered by Synology’s new APM (ActiveProtect Manager) OS, they claim to deliver up to a 30-fold reduction in TCO compared with other solutions as they are preconfigured with a high storage capacity and avoid complex and costly licensing as their one-time purchase allows unlimited workloads to be secured up to the limits of the storage.

ActiveProtect offers unified data protection and recovery for a wide range of environments. It supports Windows and Mac endpoints, Windows and Linux servers, Oracle and SQL Server databases, SMB, NetApp, Nutanix and Synology NAS file servers, VMware and Hyper-V hosts, and all Microsoft 365 services.

The ActiveProtect family currently comprises three members – the 2U rackmount DP7400 plus the desktop 4-bay DP340 and 2-bay DP320 – and it’s important to understand their target markets and the relationships between them. We discussed this with Synology which advised us it is not currently offering the DP340 and DP320 as standalone backup appliances for smaller businesses.

These two appliances are designed primarily for deployment in remote locations where they provide fast local backup and recovery services and are centrally managed as cluster members by a DP7400. The base price enables support for three cluster members (including the DP7400) with further three-year cluster licenses costing €1,800.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Hardware and deployment

The DP7400 is powered by a 12-core 2.9GHz AMD EPYC 7272 CPU teamed up with 64GB of DDR4 field-upgradeable to 512GB. You get a dedicated Gigabit management port and dual 10GbE data ports with two spare PCIe slots for further network upgrades using Synology’s adapter cards.

The system is supplied with ten 20TB Synology HAT5310 SATA HDDs and two 3.84GB SAT5221 SATA SSDs. Deployment is swift as we followed the appliance’s web-based wizard which installed APM and automatically configured a RAID6 array with hot-spare using all HDDs and a RAID1 SSD read/write cache with the whole process taking a shade over 15 minutes.

The web console presents a smart dashboard view with details on all protected workloads, total data size, the efficiency of APM’s source-side deduplication plus backup copy status. It provides a job calendar view that’s similar to the DSM Active Backup for Business app but goes much further with status details of cluster members along with graphs for backup duration, data increase, and storage usage trends.

Synology also provided us with a DP320 appliance which we set up as a remote backup device. After declaring it to the DP7400, it appeared in the main APM console and advised us it was under new management.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Protection plans

APM includes two default protection plans for general use and Microsoft 365 backups but it’s easy enough to create your own. Ransomware protection kicks in immediately as all plan creation tasks start by offering you the choice of standard or immutable local storage where the latter stops any backup versions from being deleted until the retention period you’ve set has expired.

Jobs can be scheduled to run at regular intervals, you can decide how many versions to retain, make plans application-aware, and customize how they handle databases. An outstanding feature is backup verification for virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers as with this enabled, the plan runs test restores to APM’s internal hypervisor, confirms they work, and records the processes as downloadable MP4 videos.

The last step is to decide if you want backups copied to a secondary location. You can define other remote APM appliances and we used our Synology C2 and Amazon S3 cloud storage accounts to assign buckets to APM which enhances ransomware protection by only accepting immutable buckets with Object Lock enabled and can enforce client-side encryption for secure transmissions.

We also created plans for the DP320 that backed up Windows clients locally at the remote site and copied the backups to the DP7400. More ransomware protection is provided with an air-gap feature that can be applied to backup copy appliances that for the specified periods, isolates them by denying connections. It also deactivates all network cards and, if required, shuts them down.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Declare and protect

Adding Windows PCs, macOS clients, and physical Windows and Linux servers requires the ActiveProtect agent to be installed locally. You create a connect key from the APM console by selecting the appliance you want to assign the workload to, enter the appliance’s local IP address or remote FQDN along with the key in the client’s interface and it will link up and offer to start the assigned backup plan.

Declaring our Hyper-V and VMware vCenter hosts only required their IP addresses and credentials and we could assign individual VMs to plans or use the auto backup feature at the host level so all newly created VMs are included. Backup performance over 10GbE is good as our first backup to secure three Hyper-V Windows Server VMs totaling 900GB only took 13 minutes.

Adding our Microsoft 365 tenant was a piece of cake as APM asked us to authenticate and accept its permission requests after which it created a new Entra ID APM app. We opted to use the default Microsoft 365 backup plan and apply it to all Exchange, OneDrive, Chat, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, and Teams components.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Recovery features

Data restoration features are in abundance as you choose a workload, load the recovery portal, view its files, folders, or volumes, pick a recovery point, and decide where to send them. Database recovery is a little more involved as we selected our SQL Server host VM, viewed its databases, downloaded the relevant MDF and LDF files and manually moved them to the target for restoration.

Another option is the recover to VM option which can be applied to any supported workload and can use VMware, Hyper-V or APM’s built-in hypervisor. For our SQL Server host, we created a new VMware VM which took 24 minutes over a Gigabit connection while recovery to APM’s own hypervisor took 6 minutes.

For Microsoft 365 recovery, we used the portal to select components plus a point in time and restore them to their original location or, for items such as emails and OneDrive files, to another user. APM also provides a self-service portal so authenticated users can carry out recovery tasks without pestering support staff.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Is it worth it?

The market for purpose-built backup appliances is intensely competitive and Synology’s ActiveProtect offers a solid alternative to the established names. With an MSRP of €39,999, the DP7400 is offering a lot for your money and you don’t need to worry about client or capacity-based licenses either as everything is included in a one-off purchase.

The full house of 20TB HDDs delivers around 122TB of usable backup capacity and Synology’s deduplication algorithms are very efficient as our 7TB of test backup data was squashed down to only 1.2TB representing a 1% usage. The DP340 and DP320 aren’t such good value as they have MSRPs of €4,125 and €1,650 respectively but integrating them as cluster members is easy and they simplify remote site backup and replication.

We found it pleasingly easy to deploy and combining all the features offered by APM’s plans allows you to create a fully managed 3-2-1-1-0 strategy. Larger businesses that want an affordable all-in-one solution for their entire data protection strategy will find Synology’s ActiveProtect DP7400 is a strong contender.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 specifications