Keith Shaw: Hi everybody, welcome to DEMO, the show where companies come in and show us their latest products and platforms. Today, I'm joined by Cody Hall. He is a product manager at Synology. Welcome to the show, Cody. Cody Hall: Happy to be here.

Keith: And you're a hardware company, right? I'm excited—we get so many software companies in here. You guys have been in the storage space for a while. So, what are you going to be showing us today?

Cody: I'm going to be showing you Active Protect Manager, a dedicated all-in-one enterprise backup and software solution. Keith: Who is this really designed for? Are you moving into the enterprise space, and is that why we're seeing some of these new products?

Cody: Yes, this system was specifically designed for enterprises looking to streamline the design, implementation, and management of their backup infrastructure—even at scale—while taking into consideration industry standards for ransomware protection, air gapping, and the like.

Keith: Okay, and I'm assuming this is geared towards network or storage managers within a company. Are there other people or groups who would benefit from this? Cody: Oftentimes at an enterprise, there's a whole team dedicated to managing backups at that scale.

So this is really targeted at those teams and the pain points they experience managing other systems. Keith: Is everybody doing backup well these days, or is it still kind of a mess? Cody: Actually, not so well.

We've done some workshops over the past couple of years, and whenever we asked the audience how many had tested and run their backups, we saw very few hands raised. It was a little concerning. So no, I don't think everyone is doing backups perfectly across the board.

Keith: Okay, so what problem is Active Protect Manager aiming to solve? Why should a company be interested in learning more about this product?

Cody: The reason you'd want to learn more is that, since it's a dedicated hardware and software solution, your backup teams won’t spend as much time speccing out the hardware and software. The system comes with preconfigured hardware and software, so you can essentially repeat deployments as you scale.

That means your IT team uses less brainpower and can focus their attention elsewhere. Keith: So if a company didn’t have this, they’d be spending a lot more time on backup setup? Cody: Oh, definitely.

With other backup vendors, you might get hardware-agnostic flexibility, but that creates a burden of choice. Your IT team would have to design and implement everything themselves, making expansion harder. This solution aims to alleviate those pains. Keith: All right, let’s jump into the demo. Show us what you’ve got.

Cody: Wonderful. This is Active Protect Manager. This will be the environment we’ll be walking through.

We’re going to take a look at how the system helps with management, backup targets, and different restore options. The dashboard is your main snapshot of your backup health. You’ll see total workloads, total data size in terabytes, and storage usage trends.

It’s a great tool to ensure your backups have no errors. For example, if there are warnings or errors, you can dive in and begin triaging those issues.

Another great feature inside Active Protect Manager is the plan architecture. Protection plans are a powerful management tool because when you edit them, it changes the backup policy for all protected workloads.

There are many different options, but we’ll call out the key ones that help you achieve a 3-2-1-1-0 backup topology.

Right at the top is immutable protection plans—definitely one of the most popular features today.

You can set the default cadence for your primary backup—daily, hourly, etc.—and customize the settings for specific device types like Windows Servers or Mac devices.

We also support advanced, application-aware backups using industry-standard tools like VMware Tools, Hyper-V services, and VSS. We’ll show restore options for that in a moment.

The next page relates to the “zero” in the 3-2-1-1-0 model—three copies, two mediums, one off-site, one immutable, and zero errors.

You can enable backup verification for critical VMs and physical servers. It captures a low-resolution video of the backup image, boots it in the internal hypervisor, and records that video.

You also have options to create backup copies—either to another Active Protect appliance (like the DP7400, 340, or 320) or off-site to remote storage, such as Active Protect Vault, C2 Object Storage, or AWS S3.

In a nutshell, those are your plans. You can modify your backup policies from here anytime.

Once these plans are in place, you can apply them to physical machines and set them as auto-discovery policies for VMs.

Let’s walk through some restore options now. We’ve already collected some backups. For example, we have a SQL Server with the AdventureWorks sample database loaded.

With application-aware and SQL-specific backups in place, you have two restore options.

First, you can go into the Recovery Portal and download the MDF and LDF database files. In the "Browse Files" view, under the "Databases" tab, you can pull those files and download them directly.

Then, you'd use SQL commands to inject that data back into the server.

Alternatively, you can spin up the full VM using the “Restore to Virtual Machine” option. You can choose a full or instant restore to VMware, Hyper-V, or the internal hypervisor on the Active Protect Manager.

Let’s do that now. We'll connect it to a default VM network and initiate the restore.

As you can see, the SQL Server VM is restored on the internal hypervisor, and the whole process took about 12 seconds. Keith: Wow, so you're saving a lot of time compared to other methods? Cody: Yes. Since it's local, there's virtually no data in flight.

A full restore to production would be limited by your network bandwidth. Keith: Are companies mostly restoring because of security incidents, or are there other reasons?

Cody: Restores can be used to return to a previous point in time for sandbox testing, to try an update before pushing to production, or even for compliance purposes. Keith: All right, cool. That’s a lot of great stuff.

I know you’ve got more features, but where can people go to learn more? Do you offer demos or free trials? Cody: Yes, definitely. You can visit our website at synology.com. There’s a Knowledge Center there, plus our YouTube channel, which has hours of product training content.

You can also submit an inquiry to schedule a live demo or set up team training on the Synology suite. Keith: Cody Hall from Synology, thanks for joining the show—and thanks for the demo. Cody: Happy to be here. Keith: That’s all the time we have for this week’s episode.

Be sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel, and leave your thoughts in the comments. Join us every week for new episodes of DEMO. I'm Keith Shaw—thanks for watching! ?