‘Love You Baby' Child Photography Studio

Synology NAS server, with numerous HDDs installed, offers the most stable data storage solution. For digital photography and video editing professionals who lacks IT knowledge, Synology is the best option. Zhang Ke, network engineer of ‘Love You Baby' Child Photography Studio.

The Company

In a declining birth rate era, every child is a treasure. We listen to the wishes of our customers by capturing the cutest and the most innocent moments of their beloved and precious ones. Since its founding in 2001, under the service-oriented philosophy, ‘Love You Baby' has become the most successful child photography studio in Eastern China with over hundred employees dedicated to high-quality service.

The Challenge

To achieve the best photo quality, ‘Love You Baby' uses Nikon D3 DSLR for their photo shoots. The amount of data grows rapidly in this booming market. On top of increasing concerns for data security and facing over 5TB of artwork design archives and a yearly growth of 3TB of client data, the company needs to find a better way of organizing and centralizing their invaluable pictures.

In the past, they used RAID 1 SAS setup for their PC system and used RAID 5 array to implement large amount of SATA HDDs on a single hardware RAID card to store their data at a 8TB maximum. Gradually, the storage space became insufficient and hardware upgrade required exporting the old data to new servers, which was no easy task. For the PC file server, they had to settle on a fixed amount of storage capacity and HDDs, and as result expansion to the existing storage hardware was considered difficult. In the following year, they've encountered numerous problems such as the hardware RAID card dropping HDDs, detecting bad sectors, and even corrupt files. For file server under RAID 5 settings, if one HDD is dropped, the I/O performance will stagger. If one additional HDD drops, data will be lost. ‘Love You Baby' has come to recognize that using PC file server is very risky due to the instability and rigid nature. If something wrong happens, the operation cost to repair the damage is substantial.

The company needs to find an alternative solution that includes the following: 

1. Secure data, centralized management
2. Large amount of storage space with high scalability
3. High I/O throughput
4. Gigabit network support
5. Easy to use and troubleshoot.

The Solution

After comparing several different file servers and NAS products, they chose Synology as their main datacenter for the HQ. Besides matching the above criteria, Synology NAS server can be scaled up on-the-fly. In addition, it has an optimal price/performance ratio and an easy-to-use DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system which ultimately sealed the deal.

High Scalability

The HQ operates RackStation RS3411xs with ten 2TB HDDs to implement RAID 10 setup, which provides optimal I/O performance and data security. Dual Gigabit LAN connection ensures maximum data transfer speed. With the added RX1211 expansion unit under RAID 6 configuration provides at least 54TB of storage space for 5 years usage. For franchise and branch stores, DS411+II is used as a 2nd-level data center to make sure normal everyday operations are functional. As time progresses, high satisfaction from both employees and customers proves Synology NAS server is the right choice for improving work efficiency and quality of service.

Centralized management and data backup over the internet

Before, data was scattered across different places. Various versions of backup existed in different file folders and in different computers, which was a waste of storage space in addition to finding the data you want being a major trouble. With Synology NAS servers, all the important data is collected and stored in a centralized manner, carefully organized for future uses.

The ‘Love You Baby' HQ uses 4M fiber-optic connection, which is very expensive in China. All franchise and branch stores use ADSL which estimates from 500K to 1M upstream. Every store generates close to 5GB of high-definition image each day, and transfers to HQ for processing. Using the network backup function, the RS3411xs is set as the backup destination, whereas the DS411+II from branch stores are configured to run a scheduled daily backup after work to transfer the data steadily to HQ. With this new approach, the network usage is fully utilized without having to share bandwidth during working hours. In comparison to the old method of creating DVD data to HQ, the new method not only saves man power but also enables better time management.

Stable, trustworthy and easy to maintain datacenter

At ‘Love You Baby' photography studio, customer's data are stored from 5 to 10 years, so storage reliability is crucial. Hard disks run 24 hours a day is a huge test to its stability. Synology products provide HDD diagnostic function that sends out warnings if a HDD is behaving strangely for the user to swap the malfunctioning HDD in advance. With hot-swap support, the new HDD will be automatically integrated into the current RAID array without any server downtime. This new method is more convenient and time-saving compared with manual setup when a corrupted HDD is discovered while using PC file server.

In short, Synology NAS servers, with numerous HDDs installed, is the most stable data backup and sharing solution and the best option for digital photography and video editing professionals who lacks IT knowledge.

Recommended Models

  • RS3411xs
  • RX1211
  • DS411+II

Recommended Features

  • Network Backup
  • High Scalability
  • User-friendly DiskStation Manager OS
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