The ideal appliance balances ownership cost, recovery speed and storage scalability. Synology DP320 and DP340 deliver one-time purchase, no license fees and capacities from 5 TB to 14.5 TB, perfect for growing SMBs.

You can run automated disaster recovery drills on Synology DP series appliances that boot backup images as virtual machines. This verifies recoverability and provides compliance reporting, no MSP required.

While standard support is always included with your purchase, premium support is an optional add-on for users who need faster, more advanced assistance. It provides priority ticket handling, direct contact with senior support engineers and 24/7 coverage to minimize downtime and resolve issues quickly through advanced troubleshooting, remote sessions and expedited hardware replacement.
Learn about Synology's premium support.

Owning a turnkey appliance like DP340 gives you MSP-level protection, cloud replication, immutability and compliance features, without recurring subscription costs. Fixed upfront investment delivers long-term value.

Yes. DP appliances protect VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads without VM-per-licensing limits. Backups happen while workloads run, so virtual infrastructure stays online.

Synology DP340 delivers simple yet powerful compliance that the “unplanned IT Manager” can implement quickly with little effort, including immutable storage, audit logging and air-gapped backup options in a all-in-one package.

ActiveProtect Manager includes tenant separation and role-based access control. You can manage multiple environments securely from one console, with clear audit trails and reporting.

DP series towers arrive fully populated and optimized for backup workloads, simplifying storage and RAID configuration for instant deployment. Management is unified across appliances, databases, endpoints, VMs and SaaS sources, license-free. The hardware and software bundle provides precise, predictable costs and shorter time-to-value than custom modular setups.

It goes further. Instead of screenshots, Synology DP340 offers backup verification with features such as automated recovery testing in a sandboxed environment and the ability to record the entire boot-up process as a video to verify that the backup is validΩΩ. This verification procedure is intended to confirm that backups are restorable and systems will boot as expected.

The choice often comes down to upfront costs versus ongoing expenses. Many businesses prefer a hybrid approach: investing CapEx in on-prem infrastructure for immediate ownership, while leveraging OpEx with Synology C2 cloud for flexible scalability and off-site storage. This combination delivers a complete hybrid solution that keeps data ownership local while simplifying off-site protection and growth.

Synology DP series delivers stronger ransomware protection than Barracuda 3004 because it combines true write-once (WORM) storage, enforced retention and RAID protection, ensuring backups remain immutable and intact even if drives fail or a ransomware attack occurs. Its platform also features built-in anti-ransomware tools like immutable snapshots and least-privilege access, which prevent attackers from altering or deleting backups. In contrast, Barracuda 3004 relies primarily on its cloud vault for immutability and does not include RAID or advanced local controls in its appliance, leaving on-premises backups more exposed to both hardware failure and threats from ransomware.

Researching century-old newspapers on microfilm is like relying on tape backups in business, reliable for preservation but fragile, manual and slow to search or restore. Migrating to appliances such as Synology DP340 is like adopting a digital archive: you gain instant search, automated organization, rapid access and built-in protections. Instead of winding through reels or tape, businesses can quickly locate, verify and restore critical data while benefiting from immutability, redundancy and air-gapped backups that defend against modern threats like ransomware. The move goes beyond convenience, it delivers efficiency, speed and security that legacy systems can’t match.

Synology provides support to achieve BAA only when used with C2 object storage. When using DP series to copy your backups to C2 Object storage, you will have Synology’s support for HIPAA compliance via BAA.

Synology backup appliances ship with drives and setup instructions. Just unpack and insert the drives, no tools or technical expertise needed.

Schedule backups daily, weekly or monthly, or trigger them by events like restarts, logouts or screen locks on Windows or Mac endpoints. Policy-based triggers can replicate data to off-site locations such as Synology C2 with immutability support, ideal for protecting data during high-risk changes or ransomware events.

Your RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines how much data you can afford to lose between backups and your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) defines how quickly systems must be restored. Businesses with frequent transactions, such as healthcare or finance, need low RPOs (minutes to hours) and short RTOs (near-instant). Less data-intensive businesses can extend those windows. DP series appliances let you set flexible schedules and policies to match your RPO and RTO goals.

Synology DP series uses AES-256 encryption for data at rest and TLS/SSL encryption for data in transit. Key management is integrated, with options for local keys, password-based access and support for external key management services if required. This ensures sensitive data stays secure during storage and transfer.

Immutable snapshots lock data so it cannot be altered or deleted within a set retention window. WORM (Write Once, Read Many) ensures files can be written once but never modified, commonly used for compliance. Air-gap storage keeps a physical or logical copy of data offline or disconnected, preventing ransomware from reaching it. DP series supports all three methods, providing layered defense.

Best practice is to test restores quarterly or after major system changes. DP series appliances simplify this with automated disaster recovery drills that boot backups as virtual machines in a sandbox. This validates that data can be restored quickly and provides video and log evidence for audits.

DP320 uses a RAID 1 configuration. RAID 1 or mirroring, is best for smaller capacities, offering redundancy but less usable space.

DP340 uses a RAID 5 configuration. RAID 5 provides higher usable capacity with redundancy across multiple drives, adding an extra layer of protection to multi-terabyte workloads.

DP340 uses SSD cache to accelerate deduplication, indexing and recovery. This speeds up multi-user restores, backup verification and database protection compared to HDD-only systems.

10GbE networking enables faster backups and restoration. That reduces backup windows and ensures recovery in minutes instead of hours, especially valuable for VMware or database workloads.