The Company
Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe GmbH, based in Langenhagen, Germany, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Konica Minolta Business Technologies, Inc., Tokyo, Japan and part of the business area Business Technologies. As a leading global service provider in the field of IT- and document processes as well as digital production printing solutions the company excels in service-led business consulting, implementation and management and provides a range of world-leading printing systems and solutions. In this context, Konica Minolta's Optimized Print Services concept (OPS) combines consultancy, hardware, software implementation, and operation in order to enhance business process efficiency and cost-effectiveness. To support customers optimally with powerful and sustainable solutions, technology leader Konica Minolta continuously invests in research and development work and regularly sets new standards.
Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe is represented by subsidiaries and distributors in more than 70 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). With over 30,600 employees around the world, Konica Minolta Business Technologies earned net sales of over EUR 5.4 billion in financial year 2012/13.
The Challenge
Every two years, Konica Minolta Europe organizes the European Leadership Conference, an event dedicated to European market. The goal of the Conference is to update more than 1,100 Partners, distributors and reseller of Konica Minoltas' national organizations about new and future products. At this event product innovations will be closely presented. To ease everyone's access to information, 30 preconfigured notebooks in total will be deployed. They will be used to present to partners recent solutions of document handling. The challenge is to get them back to an operational state in the most effective and efficient way after a potential malfunction. A central storage system is required in order to quickly create backups without errors. This way, it's possible to preserve the notebooks state in case of damage to ensure smooth operation of the most important event for Konica Minolta at European level.
The Solution
After evaluating the NAS market and reading reviews in various publications, Synology was identified as the NAS manufacturer providing the highest usability and user-friendliness. The choice fell on a Synology RS812+ with an expansion unit RX410 to back up the hard drive images of all notebooks. This ensured a smooth operation of the event. Within a very short time, backups were created and in case of a problem, they were re-uploaded onto respective notebooks. The alternative solution, backups on external hard drives has been rejected: high costs and loss risks were too high.
The Benefits
User-Friendliness
The operating software from Synology can be used intuitively which not only makes the installation of the system, but also the management of it very easy. Therefore complicated administrative tasks fell away and it was possible to concentrate on what was really important, the smooth and successful running of the event. With the Synology Backup Replicator the backups were set up in no time and all important data was backed up with a few clicks.
Continuous Reliability & high performance
Through a series of high availability features, such as passive CPU cooling, redundant system fans, hot-swap drives and two LAN ports with failover support the Synology RS812+ guarantees a smooth processing of the exhibitions and a fast of the operation in case of a problem. This event is the biggest and most important in Europe by its size and the broad variety of presented solutions. To ensure a smooth and informative seminar for the attendees, the picked solution had to be reliable and efficient.