It was a casual Thursday afternoon, and it was just a few days before our senior infrastructure administrator was scheduled to be moving on in his career and start somewhere new. As his time with us counted down, he was asked to help clean up unused data to ease our storage woes.
Having only 20TB of physical storage in our server room and quickly approaching that threshold, it was a team effort to clean up around 5TB of data to prevent maxing out our storage environment. As the senior infrastructure admin started to clean up old server backups, he, truly, made a huge mistake and deleted the company’s entire financial database.
At first, he did not realize that he had done anything damaging. After a minute, our alerting system began squawking that there was a problem. We almost brushed off the alert as it sometimes has false positives and we asked ourselves ‘why would anything be wrong with our financial database?
It’s a good thing we checked the database instead of ignoring it because it had gone, as if it never existed. Years of company financial data gone in a matter of seconds using a deletion process that was irreversible.
The team of four, including myself and the infrastructure admin, looked at one another with confused faces of what to do now.
We do not back up every piece of data that we have on our primary server. Luckily, our second infrastructure administrator had noticed that our financial data was not being backed up and backed it up only a week before this incident.
The off-site backup may have been a few hours old, but happily, stored at our off-site backup site was all our financial data. After a timely download of 100GB through our 100Mbps download internet pipe, everything was kosher and restored.
I have always stressed the importance of data backup and data storage. It is crucial, and as a business, it shouldn’t be a question of “should we”, but rather a statement of “we need to”. What would a company honestly do if many years’ worth of their financial data had disappeared forever?
You cannot predict what will happen to your local storage solution. There is a number of possibilities, including hardware failure and human error, as in an incident I recently went through when our server room power supply failed.
As applications begin to demand more storage space and as businesses continue to grow, storage space is a growing woe that every business is bound to experience. Luckily there are ways to expand your environment in secure, affordable ways.
As an IT administrator, finding a new data solution that can scale with the business is something that can be difficult to do. You need a system that will be upgradable, manageable, and most importantly, offer a backup solution that can grow and adapt environment.
A lot of people have thought about going down the cloud route; using the cloud to store their data and not having the worries that come with managing an off-site location. While that may seem like the answer, cloud solutions are often inexpensive when uploading data, but get pricey when downloading it. This is not ideal for applications that both upload and download or for users who are reading and writing to network files.
One of the leaders in data storage, Synology, is attempting to give you the best of both worlds. They understand that the cloud offers great reliability, but they also know that cloud storage is expensive and has its drawbacks. At the same time, they know the pros and cons of local storage.
With an expanding product line, Synology believes that with their new products they can give you a one-time cost environment that is always available, completely private, and secure, all while offering the benefits of cloud storage.
The cloud is one of the best technological advancements we have seen in a while, but the cloud is still years away from being a complete replacement for local storage. As reliable as the cloud can be, the costs that come with it are out of the range of even a medium-sized business. In addition, with ‘fast storage’ costing more than “slow storage”, running high availability servers such as an ERP or WMS isn’t an ideal option.
On local storage servers, such as Synology’s rack-mounted units, you boost your ability to run whatever application you need, at the speed you desire, using the drives that you want. All of which is done without a monthly subscription. The drawback here is that drive failure and human error can cause loss of data.
Solve the problem of accidental data loss and add cloud-like reliability to physical storage and you’ve solved the world’s data storage woes. This is exactly what Synology has focused on doing.
Rated for small or large businesses, Synology servers can start small at 1TB and scale in size as the business grows, all the way up to 1PB. If you are starting a local business and looking to expand nationwide, the upfront investment costs are lower than Synology’s competitors or a cloud-only solution all while having little overhead to maintain an environment.
When it does come time to expand the Synology server, the cost is only that of new hard drives which, in return, gives a better return on investment of the initial Synology server. A product that can expand without needing to upgrade itself is ideal from a business budgeting standpoint.
This is step one in creating the best of both worlds. Both local storage and the cloud have upgradability, but with Synology’s local machines the costs are one-time and offer a faster return on investment as you continue to store more and more data without a monthly cost.
Next, Synology servers slip right into your environment without having to worry about massive business downtime. When configured through the incredible Synology DiskStation Management (DSM) operating system, you, the IT admin, could spin up a Windows Server 2016, VMWare Host, or Citrix system in a matter of minutes.
With this quick implementation into a production environment, comes the high availability that is required by ERPs and WMSs. The server remains local providing lightning fast LAN speeds all while keeping your business online. The outside world and the problems that happen outside of your business are no longer a worry to you. If a cloud provider is having internet troubles, it becomes irrelevant.
Don’t think that just because the data is local doesn’t mean it cannot be accessed from anywhere outside the network. Synology offers built-in tools that allow the data to be securely accessible outside of the business’s network. Like the cloud, your local files are now accessible anywhere, anytime, from any device.
Maintaining a local storage cluster has another positive over the cloud. You own the data on your network, and only your IT team has access to that data. No matter what type of data you are storing on your drive, someone out there wants access to it for malicious purposes. In the cloud, you take the gamble of storing data on another company’s drives, and it is not known who can access that data.
We know Synology’s solutions are accessible both inside and outside of the business’s network and that it remains private under your control. Nevertheless, what about the big point of moving to the cloud? Data backup!
There are three options you can choose as an IT admin when backing up a Synology server. You can choose to use the same primary server as a redundant backup server, use a secondary Synology server for your existing off-site backup, or jump onboard to Synology’s new Cloud C2 backup program.
Looking at all three, a redundant backup server on the primary file server doesn’t sound too bad, especially for smaller businesses. Synology can monitor the status of the connected drives and warn you in case of a failure. Furthermore, you can separate the data and use the backup automation tools to go back in time and recover previous file versions.
In case of server failure, an off-site Synology server is the option I would choose. It could be accessed through the internet, and you still maintain the benefits of local storage without a monthly cost. If the off-site backup is identical to the primary server, you could even spin up the same environment off-site.
Thanks to an off-site backup that we had, our financial data was restored and saved by the next day. Without such a backup, we may have had to spend thousands of dollars for a data recovery plant to attempt to recover what could be an unrecoverable deletion.
If you are storing files on your Synology server that aren’t accessed very often, but you do not want to delete them, you could opt to use Synology’s new Cloud solution. Ironic that we mention using a cloud solution while advocating using local storage, but this solution is something to take note of.
Synology allows a Synology server to store data on a Synology cloud that can be quickly accessed and restored if needed. Furthermore, since you are using a Synology cloud and a Synology server, you could pay for disaster recovery and spin up that same environment on identical hardware in the cloud.
This is not meant to hold all of your data to be constantly redownloaded but rather used as cold storage where files are held, but not deleted, just in case that one user needs that one file one day.
There are a lot of problems and troubles that need to be fixed by IT, but data woes shouldn’t be one of them. We have options available to us, and Synology servers offer something that no other company can, a complete package that gives IT admins the best of both local storage and the cloud.
Local storage is sticking around, and it will be something that is used for years to come. With benefits such as the ones Synology includes with their systems, it’s the cherry on top to ensure that nothing bad ever happens to your data. All of which is done under a low investment and upgrade cost.
The take away here is to not be in the situation where years’ worth of company data is just gone. Maintain a strong, stable backup and be prepared with the Synology solution that makes you look like an IT hero.
© 2018 Justin Vendette