Shiseido Taiwan Gains Faster Backups and Smarter Storage Using Synology

Whether a small firm or a medium- or large-sized enterprise, client-side backup is no easy task, and SHISEIDO Taiwan is no exception. The daily data changes can reach up to 600GB, especially with over 500 employees at its headquarters. Without proper backup tools, saving daily data alone can be a challenging task. The global deduplication technology in Synology Active Backup for Business supports deduplication across devices, platforms, and versions, reducing the storage space required for backup tasks. Additionally, it supports Changed Block Tracking (CBT), which performs incremental backups for changed blocks only, cutting down on backup data and time.

"After tests from our IT team, we found Active Backup for Business has incredible backup speeds and works wonders on deleting duplicate data — it only took up 28TB out of the total 58TB on the server. On the desktop client, after backup tests with 25 PCs and laptops, data was reduced from 6.5TB to 2.1 TB. The overall results were satisfactory. Therefore, SHISEIDO Taiwan plans to purchase high-performance Synology storage devices in 2019 and use Synology Active Backup for Business to form a desktop client backup mechanism for 500 employees at headquarters. When a system crash occurs, employees can perform bare-metal backups using a bootable USB recovery drive or file-level restoration via the intuitive user interface, efficiently shortening maintenance time and putting IT resources to good use. After headquarters adopts Synology’s backup solution, all office PCs and POS terminals in brand counters across Taiwan will gradually embrace it as well," said Zhang.

As the company grew, SHISEIDO Taiwan used VMware vSphere to create virtual hosts several years ago, cutting maintenance overheads on IT infrastructure while ensuring the stability of its branches, production lines, and order delivery. As the business expands, 55 virtual hosts are now in place. Confined by the ineffectiveness of the original backup tools, it usually took 6-8 hours to complete a backup task among virtual hosts containing databases. After using Synology Active Backup for Business, backup time was greatly shortened, and it only took 15 minutes to recover virtual machine backup data.

Zhang said the built-in global deduplication technology is the key, as it speeds up backup time and saves storage capacity. The overall performance was satisfying. Additionally, based on different scenarios, Synology Active Backup for Business supports granular file restoration via the recovery portal, instant and full VM restoration, instant restoration to Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), and instant restoration from a physical server to VMware (P2V), fulfilling the need for every occasion. The biggest advantage of integrating Synology VMM is that enterprises can restore backup data on virtual hosts to Synology storage devices. Supporting various operating systems such as Windows and Linux, Synology VMM provides enterprises with a temporary disaster recovery solution and an upgrade testing environment.

Synology Active Backup for Business enables cross-platform backup, deletion of duplicate data, and integration of VMM, effectively helping SHISEIDO Taiwan back up data stored in physical and virtual environments. Changed Block Tracking and global deduplication considerably reduce the time and space required for backup tasks by over 50%. A wide array of disaster recovery solutions, including integration with VMM, greatly helps SHISEIDO Taiwan protect its various enterprise workloads.