Het Streek
"Synology solutions have helped us save €21,000 annually and our backup speeds have improved 16 times. The reliable UC3200 and SA3400 units, along with Active Backup for Microsoft 365, are all we need to safely back up all 3,000 of our Microsoft 365 accounts, as well as account data for our students and teachers. We have peace of mind knowing our data can always be recovered."
- Wim Hendriks, Head of ICT, Het Streek
The Company
Founded in 1995, Het Streek is a comprehensive school with a total of more than 3,000 students and staff spread across two locations and one head office.
The school provides students with the space to grow in directions that suit their abilities, with programs ranging from vocational training to the region's only "Technasium" pre-university track focused on science and technology.
During classes, students are encouraged to use laptops and digital workbooks as much as possible while learning 21st century skills.
The Challenge
Het Streek makes use of a remote computing environment and Microsoft cloud applications to ensure a fast desktop experience for students and staff, no matter which endpoint they are using. Virtual desktop infrastructure ensures painless switching between computers, reducing loading and synchronization to a minimum by streaming applications and data directly from centrally hosted user profiles.
With daily PC use relying on remote computing, it is crucial that user profiles are kept available at all times. For the solution to deliver tangible benefits to users, profiles must be loaded as fast as possible.
To improve system performance, the school needed extremely reliable and lightening-fast storage to host their Microsoft FSLogix Profile Containers and other crucial data. The new solution also needed to be cost-efficient and offer better protections against downtime and data loss.
Het Streek also needed a complete solution to back up data from their 3,000 Microsoft 365 accounts, including emails, contacts, archives, and chat logs. With new students arriving every year, any backup hardware they acquired needed to be highly scalable in order to accommodate future storage demands.
The Solution
Het Streek had used Synology products for almost 15 years. Based on their solutions' track record for reliability, security, and efficiency, the school decided to go with Synology hardware and software once again.
Faster access to student and teacher profiles
To provide rapid and reliable access to student and teacher data, including FSLogix roaming profiles, Het Streek chose Synology's active-active SAN solution for mission critical environments, the dual-controller UC3200.
The UC3200 is a high performance storage solution that provides uninterrupted iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage services through a unified architecture. Two active controllers work together to deliver high availability in one server, ensuring minimal downtime and keeping data available in the event of hardware or software failure on any one controller.
An all-flash RAID 5 volume was set up to provide fast and low-latency access to FSLogix profile data, boosting loading speeds, while a separate HDD RAID 10 volume was created to store data including surveillance footage and pictures.
Backup times down from 8 hours to 30 minutes
To back up its Microsoft 365 accounts, the school picked Synology's most scalable SAS storage solution, the high-capacity and high-performance SA3400.
The 12-bay SA3400 can accommodate up to 180 drives using expansion units to deliver more than 1.5 petabytes of raw capacity. Together with its built-in data protection solutions, it provides high reliability and more than enough potential to accommodate the school's future data storage needs.
The unit was dedicated to backing up the school's 3,000 Microsoft 365 accounts for a total backup size of 12 TB. This was achieved at no additional cost using Synology's license-free cloud protection solution, Active Backup for Microsoft 365.
Compared with the previous storage setup, backup times were reduced 16 times, from 8 hours to about 30 minutes.
The Benefits
Using the SA3400, UC3200, and Active Backup for Microsoft 365, Het Streek now saves €21,000 annually.
UC3200 delivers FSLogix profiles to workstations direct from its SSD array, cutting loading times to a fraction of what they used to be and presenting a tangible improvement for students and staff.
Active Backup for Microsoft 365 protects the school's 3,000 Microsoft 365 profiles with daily backups to their private server at no additional cost.
SA3400 provides enough scalability to meet future data requirements, taking away the school's concerns about having to upgrade their infrastructure in the near future.
Recommended Models
- UC3200
- SA3400
- RS214
- RS408
- RS812+
- RS2212RP+
Recommended Features
- Active Backup for Microsoft 365 to back up 3,000 Microsoft 365 accounts