Technion leverages Synology's reliable and highly scalable storage for growing research data

Synology solutions have been our top choice for over 10 years because they're extremely user-friendly to configure and manage. They're not only reliable, but also highly scalable, which is necessary to accommodate our growing research data.

Samuel Iserovitch, IT Manager, Faculty of Medicine, Technion

The Challenge

Rapid growth led to frequent storage

The faculty's 24 labs handle large amounts of confidential research data every day. Each lab typically stores 20 to 30 TB of experimental data across dozens of lab computers, servers, and laptops. Dedicated storage servers are deployed at each of the faculty's labs to safely store both backup copies and raw experimental data. To accommodate the rapid growth of this data, the IT team upgrades its storage capacity at least twice per year by adding more or larger drives and servers.

The faculty previously used NetApp and Dell systems, but found both to be too costly and complex to maintain. By the time they wanted to extend the warranty on their servers, the total cost of renewal exceeded the cost of equivalent new servers. Therefore, the IT team started searching for a reliable alternative solution to protect their ever-growing pool of data.

The Solution

Reliability and scalability with user-friendly management

After comparing different vendors, the institution chose to introduce Synology systems due to their reputation for reliability, scalability, and user-friendly management. After installing the first DiskStation units, they deployed Synology clusters to one lab after another. As of 2022, over 32 Synology servers throughout the faculty store over 1 PB of data and backups.

Built-in high availability

Data is at the center of all work at the institute and to prevent failed backup or storage operations affecting their work, several teams use Synology High Availability to maximize service uptime on their systems. Two identical servers are deployed and set up in an active-passive configuration, with one unit ready at all times to take over storage services in case of planned maintenance or unexpected issues on the active system.

Local and off-site backup

Protecting all research and backup data kept on the storage servers is also crucial. For this, the team let each lab use Synology Hyper Backup or Synology Cloud Sync to back up their local Synology cluster to either a third server in another location, or their preferred cloud storage solution. Client-side encryption ensures remote data copies are kept safe from unauthorized access, while compression and smart versioning (Hyper Backup) help reduce backup sizes.

"Synology is very reliable and at a much more reasonable cost compared with our previous solution," IT manager Samuel Iserovitch said. "It has been over ten years since we installed our first Synology unit and we have been happy with its performance ever since. Going forward, we look forward to continuing working with Synology as our institution expands."

The Customer

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, established in 1912 in Haifa, Israel, is among the world's top-ranked public research universities. The institute's Ruth & Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine employs over 100 scientists from Israel and around the globe, doing basic and commercial research in almost every area of medical science.

One of the top institutions in the field, the medical faculty is the home of two Nobel winners, professor Dr. Avram Hershko and professor Dr. Aaron Ciechanover, as well as over 1000 medical and graduate students.