The Angmering School
We now have a very reliable and well documented backup routine, and this would not be possible without a well priced NAS unit with iSCSI capability Marc Ginnaw, OT Manager of Angmering School
The Company
The Angmering School is lively, happy and successful school and believes that everyone involved with the school should be committed to learning. The staff at the Angmering School work really hard to challenge all students and to encourage them to get the best out of their time while at school. There are high expectations of everyone who works there. There is a shared effort towards gaining the best possible education for the students so they can go on a successful life beyond school.
The Challenge
For Marc Ginnaw, the OT manager of the Angmering School, having an efficient yet safe backup routine is of the most important task. "We were still running partly on tape backup for critical backups, and this was becoming time consuming. Also, it was sometimes difficult to restore data, too," says Ginnaw. "Storage capacity on the tapes was also becoming an issue for us, as the size of the school is constantly growing, so is the data." Ginnaw needed to streamline the process to make it easier and more reliable to manage, in an affordable price that could reduce the school's spending on the long run.
The Solution
In order to resolve the issues and meet the requirements of the situation, Ginnaw decided to go with Synology's RS3412xs - one of the XS series NAS server designed to handle demanding tasks. Ginnaw fully populated the RS3412xs with 3TB hard drives, which would give him around 36TB of storage space. He created an iSCSI LUN via DiskStation Manager (DSM), the operating system for Synology NAS, and connected the LUN to a dedicated backup server running Symantec Backup Exec 2010 R3. As a result, Ginnaw was able to backup around 2TB of data comfortably over the weekend and 500GB over the night, on a regular basis.
The network capability allowed Ginnaw to place the NAS server in a separate building physically detached to the building containing the school's server room. "We now have a very reliable and well documented backup routine, and this would not be possible without a well priced NAS unit with iSCSI capability," says Ginnaw.
Besides backing up critical data for the school, Ginnaw already has a plan to incorporate the RS3412xs into the school's virtualization environment. "The next stage will be to connect the NAS to our VMware virtual environment so that virtual servers can be recovered in case our main storage fails."
The iSCSI support on RS3412xs allows business owners or IT administrators to easily allocate storage space as they see fit in different situations. By creating iSCSI LUNs, computers or servers in the network can recognize these LUNs residing on a NAS server as if they are physically attached hard drives. With Thin Provisioning built in, IT administrators are given more flexibility by being able to allocate storage space and expand on-demand - never will your storage volume be tied to the size of your hard drive and lack the scalability you need.
Businesses or organizations can take advantage of Synology NAS' ability to start off with a smaller storage capacity and expand as they grow and require more space. With RS3412xs, it has the capacity to hold up to 34 hard drives, or 136TB with 4TB hard drives.
With just a few clicks, IT administrators can use Storage Manager (of DiskStation Manager) to easily create new volumes, manage disk groups or add new hard drives to expand overall space. Along with its high performance spec and a suite of features that enhance system reliability, the RS3412xs is the ideal choice to store critical data.
The network capability allowed Ginnaw to place the NAS server in a separate building physically detached to the building containing the school's server room. "We now have a very reliable and well documented backup routine, and this would not be possible without a well priced NAS unit with iSCSI capability," says Ginnaw.
Besides backing up critical data for the school, Ginnaw already has a plan to incorporate the RS3412xs into the school's virtualization environment. "The next stage will be to connect the NAS to our VMware virtual environment so that virtual servers can be recovered in case our main storage fails."
The iSCSI support on RS3412xs allows business owners or IT administrators to easily allocate storage space as they see fit in different situations. By creating iSCSI LUNs, computers or servers in the network can recognize these LUNs residing on a NAS server as if they are physically attached hard drives. With Thin Provisioning built in, IT administrators are given more flexibility by being able to allocate storage space and expand on-demand - never will your storage volume be tied to the size of your hard drive and lack the scalability you need.
Businesses or organizations can take advantage of Synology NAS' ability to start off with a smaller storage capacity and expand as they grow and require more space. With RS3412xs, it has the capacity to hold up to 34 hard drives, or 136TB with 4TB hard drives.
With just a few clicks, IT administrators can use Storage Manager (of DiskStation Manager) to easily create new volumes, manage disk groups or add new hard drives to expand overall space. Along with its high performance spec and a suite of features that enhance system reliability, the RS3412xs is the ideal choice to store critical data.
Recommended Models
- RS3412xs
Recommended Features
- iSCSI LUN
- Scalable storage
- Virtualization support