Renfrewshire Council
The Synology products price and performance offer a superior end user experience, and fulfil all of the requirements that the primary schools need - plus more. We would be happy to recommend Synology NAS servers. The device delivered everything that we wanted and would definitely recommend the use of Synology's product. Mr. David Smith, ICT Engineer of Renfrewshire Council
The Company
The Challenge
For all schools there is one single Windows 2008 Domain, each of the 11 high schools has a domain controller and a dedicated member server, also each of the high schools has a dedicated ICT officer. Every member of staff and pupil in high schools has a network home folder plus a number of network resources.
The challenge was to be able to use a similar environment for primary schools without incurring the high hardware, licensing and support costs that a Windows environment requires. As most primary schools have a far smaller user base than a high school, these costs would be proportionately higher.
A device was required that could provide every staff member and pupil on a primary school site with a network home folder and other network resources, and that all these network resources can be given suitable NTFS ACLs and also that all the data could be readily backed up.
The Solution
The Synology DS211 was chosen to provide hardware resilience and speed for an extremely competitive price. The Synology device can quickly and easily be deployed. The user interface is very fast and intuitive.
The Benefits
Centralised Backup
The primary school backs up all the data stored on the DS211 using rsync to one of the high school servers, which in turn is backed up to tape each evening. The complete back up mechanism not only increases data security, but also spared the ICT engineer the time to perform the backup manually.
Permission Directories
The home directories for each of the users have proper ACLs on them, allowing multiple permissions to be applied to these. The shared directories similarly have ACLs on them allowing senior staff to have repositories to which only they have permissions to view, and the staff can also have folders to which they can add data but pupils can only read.
Multimedia Support
The DS211 supports iTunes, thus the school can have one single storage area for all music and video that they can use as teaching material throughout the whole school, rather than having local versions on each client machine.
Cost saving/ economical
The DS211 saves high hardware, licensing, and support costs that a Windows environment required.
Recommended Models
- DS211
Recommended Features
- Proper operational Windows integrated ACLs
- Operational on multiple subnets