Tourism Australia Achieves Petabyte Storage with Synology

Tourism Australia's in-house marketing team works with agencies around the world to produce media content and execute campaigns. To enable successful collaboration, it is crucial to keep their work files available and quickly accessible to all project stakeholders, while also making sure their more than 1.5 PB of digital assets are securely archived.

Tourism Australia' previously used a combination of tape for long-term archiving, external hard drives for ongoing projects, and public cloud storage to share work files with external partners. However, as their data demands grew, the costs for cloud storage as well as data transfers to and from the cloud ballooned. Meanwhile, slow transfer speeds left creatives waiting as project files were downloaded. Archiving to tape also required long waits to store and retrieve data.

Tourism Australia needed solutions that would streamline both their local operations and international collaboration while being more cost-effective and scalable at the petabyte level.

The agency's IT team concluded that an on-premises solution would be the best way to meet their data storage requirements while also improving speed, efficiency, and cost-effective scalability.

Their initial deployment consisted of three 12-bay Synology servers in desktop and rackmount form factors, which were used for local file sharing over SMB and AFP protocols, as well as to provide convenient and secure file access to remote partners. These solutions allowed staff to view and edit large project files more efficiently due to vastly shorter access times, while overseas partners could be given direct access to on-premises project files over a secure connection, saving both time and expenses associated with cloud storage.

Based on their positive experiences, Tourism Australia then decided to deploy a 60-bay Synology HD6500 as their new archiving and warm storage solution, significantly boosting their storage capability. The high-density system can be scaled on demand to 300 drives and multiple petabytes of storage. Beside providing massive, secure, and efficient storage in a relatively compact form factor, the new system is also used for day-to-day editing by creative staff due to its fast performance.

With their petabyte-scale storage solution from Synology, Tourism Australia has achieved operational improvements including:

• Streamlined workflows for both creative and IT staff with a high density on-premises solution that has reduced reliance on comparatively slow cloud and tape storage solutions

• Reduced IT expenses due to savings on cloud storage and transfers, as well as a superior cost-performance proposition for on-premises storage

• Improved data scalability to match evolving data needs, thanks to ample built-in storage and an on-demand expansion pathway to multi-petabyte storage