SK Shipping Achieves 10x Faster Disaster Recovery with Synology Storage Solutions

Prior to adopting Synology products, SK Shipping used x86-based file servers to store a large amount of business-sensitive data, with dedicated IT personnel performing management and backup tasks. However, the backup process was cumbersome due to the server limitations, which involved manually backing up tape data after transferring them to the SAN via third-party software. This also meant that if there were equipment failures or unexpected disasters, restoring the tape data would take a long time. Additionally, the annual maintenance cost amounted to a shocking 7 million won (more than $5,000 USD).

Work processes were also very complex and lengthy, especially when accessing past sales records. Not only did they have to navigate a complex system to locate the required backup tapes, but restoring the data took a considerable amount of time. Just one of these tasks could take anywhere from 30 minutes to a week, consuming IT resources and delaying the other projects.

"In an enterprise environment, data storage space is a mission-critical area, so its operations must be reliable, and management and settings must be easy and intuitive. Using this perspective, we considered Synology and other products. We concluded that Synology is like Apple when it comes to NAS, with its stable, easy, and intuitive DSM system making it incomparable to any other NAS product." Mr. Kwak Ho-dong said.

SK Shipping currently uses Synology SA3200D as its primary file server. This system caters to over 220 employees, with about 70 of them spread across domestic and overseas branches in Ulsan, Busan, Geoje, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States. With active-passive dual controller modules and built-in Synology High Availability (SHA) service, SA3200D provides real-time, system-level protection.

If a controller module or service becomes unavailable, the system can automatically failover in under a minute, helping minimize system downtime and ensure service continuity. Not only does this allow IT managers to maximize service availability without worry, but the system is highly scalable, accommodating up to 576TB to meet future data storage needs.

SK Shipping has utilized the Hyper Backup feature on the SA3200D to schedule daily automatic backups to a Synology RS819 in their Busan data center. This provides off-site remote backups and replaces the previous tape backup process, resulting in a more efficient allocation of IT resources and significant time and cost savings.

Moreover, Synology has greatly simplified SK Shipping's data restoration processes. The Snapshot Replication feature allows SK Shipping's IT planning team to take daily snapshots of shared folders on the SA3200D and store them locally for up to three years. This allows company employees to independently restore data and revert files to any point within the past three years, reducing the workload on the IT department. Actual measurements have shown that their restoration times, previously ranging anywhere from 30 minutes to a week, have been reduced to an average of five minutes, resulting in improved teamwork productivity.

SK Shipping has replaced its existing virtual machine backup software solution by introducing Active Backup for Business (ABB), Synology's license-free backup package. With this, 14 virtual machines running on HCI are backed up to SA3200D, allowing IT managers to view all VM backup statuses through a single interface. This also includes sending automatic status reports to administrators for recording and tracking.

Furthermore, through ABB's advanced global deduplication and incremental backup features, SK Shipping backed up 25 TB of data to virtual machines while only taking up 1.9 TB of storage, reducing storage by nearly 90% and reducing IT costs by 73%.

ABB also offers a number of data recovery methods for different scenarios, including file-level, bare-metal, and virtual machine restorations. Virtual machines can be restored instantly to VMware, Hyper-V, or Synology's own hypervisor platform, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), for quick service recoverability. Physical servers or virtual machines can also be migrated to VMM in the event of unexpected interruptions or in upgrade sandbox environments. SK Shipping effectively utilized this feature when one of their virtual machines' data faced the risk of corruption. They promptly restored the data to Synology VMM, preventing any potential damage to critical operational data.

Overall, through the implementation of Synology devices and built-in features like snapshots, off-site backups, and centralized VM backup management, SK Shipping experienced significant time and cost savings while enhancing productivity and ensuring data protection.