China Railway Liuyuan Group Co., Ltd.

When it comes to backup and recovery, many enterprises may face system compatibility issues, installation of required plugins, one-by-one individual client restore, and complex, confusing user interface. CRL deals in various business operations and owns 700 PCs, 13 physical servers, and 49 VMs.

Traditional backup methods present some major challenges: data synchronization across devices and platforms, and file syncing between servers and PCs, both of which result in lower efficiency and higher costs, and thus can no longer meet CRL’s digitalization demands. The efficient, convenient, centralized backup solution, Synology Active Backup for Business (ABB), however, grants CRL better control over system recovery and data backup so that they can bid farewell to difficulties and concerns over vast amounts of data.

CRL deployed a Synology NAS in 2017 and 2018, respectively. After downloading Active Backup for Business from Package Center, they could conduct specific backups for business PCs, servers, or VMware VMs and manage these backups on a centralized platform. Compatible with Windows and Linux, ABB is an agentless backup solution that can back up all enterprise endpoints. In addition, you can perform bare-metal backup and restore for PCs or servers and effectively monitor all backup tasks from one single console. In case of an emergency, minimize downtime by instantly restoring VMs to the backup host via Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

What really reduces IT effort, though, is the ease-of-use, a near-zero learning curve, and the intuitive user interface. You can see all the backup tasks at a glance from a single console. IT admins can only target and back up specific data on any device or perform bare-metal restores on all devices, realizing effective, centralized management. Besides, ABB grants employees permissions to back up their devices or restore a document to a previous historical version, thus easing the burden on IT personnel and humanizing data management with great flexibility to enhance data backup efficiency. “Small as it may seem, Synology NAS is feature-rich and easy to use, which is exactly what we need,” said Wei-Long Zhang at CRL.

In effect, backup is no easy task since most of the data in the drives is redundant. Routinely unfiltered, full backups consume too much space and lead to prolonged migration time, falling short of modern businesses’ requirements for business operational efficiency. One of the advantages of Synology Active Backup for Business is deduplication. It can save plenty of storage space, boost backup speeds, enhance storage utilization. “The test result showed that the data which formerly took up 4.4TB only needed 2.34TB of space, saving as much as 47% storage space. Space savings make future data migration and backup even more efficient, reducing large backup size and lengthy migration time,” said Zhang. 

Work efficiency and quality hinge on how well CRL integrates Synology NAS into their existing network infrastructure, manages permissions for different staff and departments, and realizes data synchronization and collaboration. As a digitalized enterprise where work is closely tied to data, how to protect the privacy of business data while allowing real-time sharing for teams has always been a conundrum.

With Synology NAS, CRL charts a new path of data application for its employees. Individual storage space, on-demand storage expansion, and convenient, secure team file sharing, Synology Drive helps employees quickly build private cloud storage, assign permissions to different departments and employees, and match existing accounts in Windows AD domain server, eliminating the burden of remembering multiple credentials. With an existing fixed IP address and domain name, employees dispersed across the country can access and back up documents whenever and wherever they want. As for system compatibility, the operating system DSM supports AD/LDAP so that you can directly join it to your account system.