Synology launches product to protect scattered data in physical, virtual, and cloud workloads

Synology has announced the official release of two major backup applications in Active Backup suite of packages, the official version of Active Backup for Office 365 that supports SaaS cloud backup, and the beta version of Active Backup for Business that provides data availability for workloads in physical and virtual environments.

Synology Application group director Jia-Yu Liu says, "More and more companies and organisations are operating across physical, virtual, and cloud platforms.

"This phenomenon presents a challenge to IT departments for ensuring the safety of the growing data in this cross-platform environment.

Active Backup for Office 365 employs single instancing technology to help businesses with the management and availability of Office 365 data and lower the space occupied by backups.

The content search function is particularly geared toward combing through content in mail and attachments, enabling users to find mail in need of recovery in the shortest time.

Key features of Active Backup for Office 365 include:

• Support multiple Office 365 endpoints: Office 365, Office 365 Germany, Office 365 operated by 21Vianet.  
• Centralised and comprehensive protection: Back up OneDrive for Business, mail, contacts, and calendar data to a Synology NAS and manage the copies efficiently from a single interface.  
• Granular restoration, search, and export from the self-service recovery portal: Efficiently filter by keyword with the new content search feature. From there, users can find the right email and restore or download a single file, mail, mail attachment, contact, or calendar event from the self-service recovery portal.  
• Backup and storage efficiency: Single instancing ensures efficiency by transferring and storing files with unique content only. Block-level deduplication helps businesses keep the most data using the least storage space by only saving a file's blocks that are changed compared to its previous version.

Active Backup for Business integrates multiple technologies adopted by DiskStation Manager (DSM).

For Btrf file system, Synology has developed the Global Deduplication function to greatly reduce the required storage for backup.

The integration with Virtual Machine Manager allows NAS backups of physical servers or virtual machines to directly run on DSM, maximizing the availability of data and applications.

Key features of Active Backup for Business include:

• PC and server protection: With the Active Backup agent utility, users can perform image-based backups to protect their Windows PC or Windows server workloads. Depending on the scenario, users could choose to restore a single file from the recovery portal, bare-metal restore the whole system, or directly run a backup image on Virtual Machine Manager to retrieve the application data and provide application availability.  
• Virtual machine protection: Users can protect their virtual machine workloads without an agent just with VMware vSphere info. It supports multiple restoration methods, ranging from individual file restore, instant VM restore to NFS, full VM restore and running on Synology VMM.  
• Faster backup: Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology performs incremental backups instead of a full backup every time.  
• Storage efficiency: Built-in global deduplication greatly reduces storage consumption.  
• Better restore reliability: Verify backups on Synology VMM to maximize backup reliability and minimise the burden in production environments.  
• Run on VMM: The unique feature, integration with Synology VMM, allows users to create the same IT environment as the product site, serving as a temporary Disaster Recovery solution, export or import objects and an upgrade testing environment.

Each Synology NAS that supports Active Backup for Office 365 comes with 10 free licenses.

Active Backup for Business

No license will be required during the beta period and software will have all functionality available.

Backing up computers, servers, and virtual machines will require purchasing a separate license per host after the conclusion of the beta testing period.