Investortools
"Synology has saved us incredible amounts of time and money. They enabled us to reduce server hardware expenditure and cancel our cloud backup subscriptions all while making infrastructure and workstation backups, system logging, and file management much easier." Dan O'Reagan IT Infrastructure Admin
The Company
The Challenge
Due to their recent growth, Investortools found their old backup and file server solutions no longer capable of meeting their needs. Whenever a computer malfunctioned or crashed, in most cases, the data recovery process was tedious, requiring the IT team to rebuild the system before they were able to restore the data. This posed a huge problem for the company as many data recovery attempts were either too lengthy or too expensive.
Another growing need for the company was backing up their G-suite and Microsoft 365 accounts/files easily without high recurring fees. They had looked into other solutions, but these solutions were not able to address their needs in a centralized and cost-effective manner.
Since Investortools uses VMs for their everyday activities, they also needed an easily scalable VM storage that could be centrally managed. They had an aging hypervisor that needed urgent replacement to support more VMs with better performance.
Ultimately Investortools needed a centralized storage solution where they could easily store, backup, and restore important company files at a lower cost.
The Solution
Luckily, Investortools' newly-arrived IT Infrastructure Administrator immediately tackled these issues and began his search for a file server and backup solution. Having worked extensively with Synology's products and having a positive experience with them in a previous job, he researched how Synology could meet their needs at Investortools. He decided to purchase a DS1019+ to trial run as the company's file server.
The IT team tested the performance of DS1019+ as a virtual machine manager and was blown away by its powerful capabilities, despite its small size. This urged Investortools to purchase two additional units, one RS1619xs+ at each office location. In addition to file sharing, they use the RackStation units as a secondary domain controller to integrate with their VMware and Hyper-V infrastructure for VM backups and as onsite backup for all of their workstations using Active Backup for Business.
After successful deployment of these Synology solutions, Investortools decided to further expand with a FS6400 device to run all of the company's file sharing, manage their datacenter's backups, provide backups for their G-Suite and Microsoft 365 accounts, and host iSCSI targets for their virtual infrastructures.
The Benefits
Investortools successfully safeguarded their data with Synology's solutions. Active Backup for Business (ABB) has helped easily recover five workstations with whole computer restores within one day – something that would have taken weeks to restore prior to implementing Synology's backup solutions. An additional perk of ABB is the ability to audit backup logs, a great benefit to Investortools who can now promise this security feature to their clients.
In a notable instance, a developer lost his access key to all of his important code files. It previously would have been a disaster to recover this data, yet with ABB in place, Investortools recovered his data in just 30 minutes. A member of the IT team noted "the NAS [has] already paid for itself," immediately proving its effectiveness and reliability.
Another benefit is Synology's Centralized Management System (CMS), which allows Investortools to manage and monitor NAS devices in one centralized location. All VM, workstation, G-Suite, and Microsoft 365 backups are easily managed through Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM). These solutions minimize the time IT spends creating backup tasks and managing devices, all while making file access a breeze and providing simple scalability.
Thanks to Synology, Investortools has an effective all-in-one storage and backup solution that met their needs and exceeded their expectations.
Recommended Models
- FS6400
- RS1619xs+ × 2
Recommended Features
- Active Backup for Business
- Active Backup for G-Suite
- Active Backup for Microsoft 365
- File Server
- VM Backups