Tekkie Town
Retail is detail, and you need to make data accessible in order to make informed decisions. Therefore, the protection of data is of zero tolerance, non-negotiable. The last thing you want is an unreliable data storage solution that is also taking more time than necessary to manage. Synology's reliable, high-performance hardware and value-added applications have not only met all our requirements, but overwhelmed our expectations. Willem Wait, CIO, Tekkie Town Pty Ltd.
The Company
Tekkie Town, founded in 2001, is a leading sport and lifestyle shoe chain in South Africa. With over 300 stores country wide, it caters for customers across all ages and genders looking for quality leisure, fashion and sports footwear. Tekkie Town stocks a wide range of branded footwear and accessories, including Adidas, Converse, Nike, Reebok, Puma, Cat, Hi-Tec, Merrell, New Balance and more.
The Challenge
In today's high risk network environment with external attacks and ransomware on the rise every day, local and offsite backups are essential for a business to conform to international standards in disaster recovery.
Being a leader in the sports retail industry, Tekkie Town had critical transaction databases that were increasing dramatically on a daily basis. They needed a storage solution that had the speed and space to back up all their data, including a growing fleet of servers hosting these databases, as well as employees' computer profiles, such as documents and desktop.
For the most critical data, it was not sufficient to keep only one local copy – they require an additional backup in a separate location to ensure that the company is safeguarded from any potential natural disaster at the head office.
Finally, the solution should also have the capability to scale with their demand as business expanded.
The Solution
Centralised, scalable backup storage for 57 servers
Synology's extensive product range and advanced software support made it the most sensible choice for Tekkie Town. They decided to deploy one Synology RS3614xs rack server to back up 57 servers locally in their head office in George, Western Cape. Its four Gigabit Ethernet ports and support for four 10GbE ports ensured the high bandwidth required for this scale of backups to take place. The 12-bay (scalable to 36-bay) design, moreover, gave them plenty of storage space to expand to.
Offsite disaster recovery capability
To achieve a sound disaster recovery strategy, Tekkie Town set up a Synology DS1513+ desktop NAS at another location, connected with a DX513 expansion unit to create a 10-bay offsite storage. They used Synology's Hyper Backup package to back up the most critical data from RS3614xs to DS1513+, making sure that even if disaster stroke at the head office, the company could still recover quickly from the offsite copy.
Private cloud solution to backup computers for 180 employees
All Synology NAS servers were managed through the built-in DiskStation Manager (DSM) software, which came with a friendly user interface and a wide range of add-on applications. The Cloud Station package, in particular, allowed Tekkie Town to build their own private cloud instead of having to rely on costly public cloud services.
Currently, the RS3614xs are also syncing and backing up computer profiles for 180 employees through Cloud Station. The most significant advantage is version control – it allows employees to go back to previous points in time when they are working on documents and projects.
In addition, the company's IT department also installed the Syslog Server package to provide a central location where all system alerts from all their servers are managed, in turn minimising administration efforts.
"Retail is detail, and you need to make data accessible in order to make informed decisions. Therefore, the protection of data is of zero tolerance, non-negotiable. The last thing you want is an unreliable data storage solution that is also taking more time than necessary to manage," Willem Wait, Tekkie Town's CIO, commented, "Synology's reliable, high-performance hardware and value-added applications have not only met all our requirements, but overwhelmed our expectations."
Recommended Models
- RS3614xs
- DS1513+
- DX513
Recommended Features
- Centralised, scalable backup storage for 57 servers
- Offsite disaster recovery capability
- Private cloud solution to backup computers for 180 employees