Toyota Motor Vietnam Ensures Business Continuity with Synology Backup Solutions

As one of the world's leading manufacturing corporations, Toyota has been steadily expanding its business over the years. In Vietnam, it operates one of Southeast Asia's primary automobile manufacturing plants, producing tens of thousands of vehicles annually. The company's data has grown significantly for both operational services and critical data protection. This rapid expansion has led to an increased need for data storage and backups, posing a substantial financial burden for the business. 

In addition, while tape backups were once valued for their isolation and resistance to tampering, they became inefficient for Toyota's growing data needs. Managing and recovering large-scale data became impractical, adding a heavy manual workload for the IT team.

Toyota Motor Vietnam required a solution that not only isolates and safeguards data against unexpected events but also enables rapid system recovery to maintain business continuity. This would ensure the continuous operation of their production system, safeguarding their reputation and market position.

Assessing options from different providers in the market, Toyota Motor Vietnam decided to use Synology's SA, UC, RS series, and ActiveProtect Appliances to enhance their data protection strategy. They established two protection plans to safeguard critical data and daily operational data.

For critical data, Toyota Motor Vietnam uses ActiveProtect DP7400 at its headquarters to perform immutable backups for 50 virtual machines (VMs) and essential servers. A secondary immutable backup copy is stored on a remote DP7400 appliance, ensuring resilience against cyber threats. This approach adheres to the 3-2-1-1-0 backup policy, incorporating multiple copies, immutability, and zero backup errors.

For daily operational workloads, 150 VMs are backed up directly to Synology SA3410, a petabyte-scale storage device tailored for growing storage needs. With the built-in data protection application, Active Backup for Business (ABB), the SA3410 securely backs up 150 VMs, ensuring reliable on-premises data storage. For enhanced protection, Snapshot Replication replicates VM backups from SA3410 to five remote Synology RackStation units, providing an extra layer of security and disaster recovery.

In addition to its backup role, the ActiveProtect DP7400 also functions as a management server at headquarters, streamlining backup management for the infrastructure through a single interface. It provides visibility into daily operations, such as the status of backups, backup copies, and storage usage, allowing Toyota Motor Vietnam to monitor the entire infrastructure's backup SLA (Service Level Agreement) on a single dashboard.

To guarantee optimal operational performance and high availability (HA) for their essential data, Toyota Motor Vietnam deployed Synology's UC SAN server and expansion unit as their corporate storage server. This active-active SAN storage, with two independent controllers, is specifically designed to ensure uninterrupted operations in critical environments, addressing the unique demands of Toyota's production line.

By replacing its previous backup setup—which required separate hardware, software, and individual licenses—Toyota Motor Vietnam significantly reduced complexity and maintenance efforts. With Synology’s integrated data protection solution, IT management is now streamlined, leading to a 75% cost reduction in protecting the company’s enterprise workloads.

Toyota has eliminated its reliance on tape backups, reducing operational overhead and manual maintenance. Unlike tapes, which require multiple reads for recovery and lack built-in verification, ActiveProtect ensures instant restore and fast, reliable recovery by verifying backup integrity and allowing direct restoration from specific versions. This significantly improves recovery speed and reliability for critical workloads.

Synology’s solutions seamlessly integrate with Toyota’s existing IT infrastructure, providing reliable protection for their business. On-premises ABB backups secure the company’s virtual environments, while Snapshot Replication offers additional offsite protection.

The addition of the ActiveProtect Appliance DP7400 also strengthens Toyota’s system by improving operational efficiency and enhancing data security. With cluster-based management and built-in WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage mechanism, Toyota Motor Vietnam can protect critical data from cyber threats and ensure rapid recovery. This solution allows them to confidently scale its storage while maintaining security and business continuity.