The Executive Centre

"Synology provided us with a cost-effective, high-performance backup solution that we were able to roll out across our network of centres in APAC within a very short timeframe."

 Jason Wong, CIO of The Executive Centre at Hong Kong

The Company

The Executive Centre (TEC) opened its doors in Hong Kong in 1994 and today boasts more than 130 centres in 32 cities and 14 countries. Hong Kong is home to Executive Centres around the world, each offering a prestigious address with the advanced infrastructure to pre-empt, meet, and exceed the needs of members. Walking with them through every milestone and achievement; empowering them to succeed.

The Challenge

TEC HK is the hub of file transfer and synchronization to their centres across the globe. However, the performance was not ideal with other brands' backup solution, i.e. it took 4-5 days to accomplish restore tasks. In addition, since there wasn't an optimal centralized backup method, local centres in different countries used to adopt various backup solutions, which made it difficult for the HK head office to manage backup files in different formats.

The Solution

Back up 126 VMs via Synology Active Backup for Business without any license fee
To solve the issues, they started to search for a substitute backup solution while most of the well-known backup software requires an expensive license fee and usually does not support agentless backup for free ESXi (vSphere Hypervisor). After Synology Active Backup for Business (ABB) was launched in 2018, TEC realized it's the backup solution that would fulfill their needs. It can centralize backup data on PCs, virtual machines, and Windows servers to a NAS without any license fee. TEC decided to adopt ABB for VM backup after 4-month trial from October 2018 to January 2019.

Jason Fuller, Infrastructure Manager of TEC HK, said "RS818+ and DS918+ are two main models deployed among TEC offices. Thanks to the friendly and coherent user interface, local IT staff can simply follow the standard guidelines to deploy and set up backup tasks without difficulties." Upon the deployment, Synology ABB also provides an effective and efficient way to enable Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on all VMs running on free ESXi, saving great efforts from manually setting up one by one. On top of that, with CBT enabled, Synology ABB also helped save storage space with an up to 24x deduplication rate.

So far TEC has finished the infrastructure deployment in Korea, Vietnam, and Australia to back up 47 VMs with 6.73TB storage consumption. Once the deployment at the rest of the centres is accomplished, there will be a total of 126 VMs running on VMware ESXi with 28.75TB storage consumption protected by Active Backup for Business.

The Benefits

"Synology provided us with a cost-effective, high-performance backup solution that we were able to roll out across our network of centres in APAC within a very short timeframe." said Jason Wong, CIO of TEC HK.

After the adoption of ABB, IT managers are satisfied with its stable performance and centralized backup mechanism which helps them easily manage cross-site VM backup tasks without worrying about file format inconsistency. Due to the unified and friendly user interface, every deployment at the local office can be done quickly with a standard procedure made by TEC HK headquarters. What's more, without license cost, TEC HK headquarters can better allocate and control the budget for local centres.

In the future, TEC will consider applying Synology Active Backup for Office 365 to protect their data on public cloud, building a comprehensive backup solution.

Recommended Models

  • RS818+ × 5
  • DS918+ × 9

Recommended Features

  • Synology Active Backup for Business
  • Centralized and license-free backup solution
  • Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology integrated
  • Friendly and coherent user interface
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