Shiseido saves 52% of storage capacity with data deduplication technology of Synology solutions

Ransomware virus ran rampant in 2017, and some of our employees' PCs were infected. To protect company's critical data, Zhang Jiao-Hao, Manager of Information System Planning Department at SHISEIDO Taiwan, started to look for a cross-platform backup solution. They had adopted several well-known backup software, but it turned out to be costly, ineffective, and user-unfriendly. After knowing that Active Backup for Business can centrally back up data on client PCs, virtual machines, Windows servers to a NAS, and that they can manage all backup tasks on a single console to fulfill cross-platform backup needs without purchasing other backup tools or costly software licenses, SHISEIDO Taiwan joined the beta program for a 3-month trial as of June, 2018.

Be it a small firm or a medium- or large-sized enterprise, client-side backup is no easy task. SHISEIDO Taiwan is no exception. The daily changed data can reach up to 600GB, especially when there are over 500 employees in the headquarters. Without proper backup tools in place, saving daily data alone can be a challenging task. Global deduplication technology in Synology Active Backup for Business supports deduplication across devices, platforms, and versions, reducing storage space required for backup tasks. In addition, it also supports Changed Block Tracking (CBT), which performs incremental backup 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 2.1TB. 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 in the headquarters. When a system crash occurs, employees can perform bare-metal backup using a bootable USB recovery drive or file-level restoration via the intuitive user interface, which efficiently shortens the maintenance time and puts IT resources to good use. After the headquarters adopts Synology’s backup solution, all the 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 stability of its branches, production lines, and order delivery. As business continues to expand, there are 55 virtual hosts in place now. 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 greatly shortened, and it only took 15 mins to recover virtual machine backup data.

Zhang said that the built-in global deduplication technology is the key, for 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 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.