“Overall we are extremely happy with the NAS; so far it has been the most returning hardware investment we have made, extremely efficient and with an amazing build quality, and very reliable software. The support is amazing, for a simple backup related question I have been contacted over phone in a few hours after I have sent the support ticket, by a QNAP employee natively speaking my own language. I was very impressed,” - Popescu Florin, Administrator of ERMETHIC Design.

Introduction

ERMETHIC Design is a private company founded in 2002 in Romania. They provide architectural design and authorization services in the local area, as well as project and product presentation services for clients both local and abroad. ERMETHIC Design is constructed by a handful of architects with extensive experience and passion in their field, always trying to find new related areas and activities to explore. One of their goals is to keep the profession in tune with all the technological advances in the field. They are always passionate about their gadgets.

Challenges/Business Needs

ERMETHIC Design was in need of a reliable and safe solution as the centralized storage. As the business was expanding, the solution had to be fully customizable to meet their existing and upcoming needs. They also had to be able to access the files from remote locations with ease and no security risk. ERMETHIC Design collaborates with a lot of companies in related fields and shares data among the group in a regular manner. They also intended to grant access to the clients to their own projects in different design phases over the Internet with a secure environment and the minimal administration cost.

Since ERMETHIC Design worked with very sensitive data and generally short deadlines, they could not afford to lose time for hardware failure; they needed a storage solution which allowed incremental and scheduled backup. Additionally, ERMETHIC Design was working on expanding their business by several work-related public websites, for which they need an Apache based web-server with MySQL database and easy administration management system.

Benefits

After extensive research, ERMETHIC Design reached the conclusion that for all the models available at the time of purchase, QNAP TS-439 Turbo NAS would benefit them the most.

Local storage centre for cross-platform file sharing
In-office workstations of ERMETHIC Design are Windows and Linux based, using mounted network drives on the NAS as the primary storage for the work-related data. This allows several people who use different operation systems to work on the same project, and eliminates the need of constantly backing up the data on workstation hard drives. Also, if the workstation hardware fails, there is no danger of losing any data, and the work can instantly be continued by any other workstations. QNAP NAS creates a save space for the whole company to work as a team.

Remote storage centre with secure access right management
The work-related data can be accessed from the remote workstations by the staff. In addition, ERMETHIC Design shares the data stored on the NAS with several companies they work with and a group of architecture students who is temporarily working in ERMETHIC as the apprentices. Some file repositories are set up for the clients who need to access the data during different phases of the project with ERMETHIC. All the people, over 100 users who share the access to the NAS, can easily access the data by FTP or HTTP, but with specific and limited access rights which maintain data security.

RAID configuration for high data redundancy
The NAS is set up with 4 drives in a RAID5 configuration. All the data are automatically backed up into an online cloud by the custom QPKG, Crashplan, by an incremental backup every hour. ERMETHIC Design is currently thinking of purchasing at least one more QNAP NAS to use as backup redundancy.

Web server & MySQL database for easy website building
ERMETHIC Design is working on a public website with work-related legislation and publications, and the fact that the NAS can provide an Apache based web server and the access to MYSQL database has been of tremendous help.

QPKG applications for the expansion of NAS functions
QPKG application packages offer enormous expansion of the NAS functions. ERMETHIC Design uses plenty of QPKG plugins, such as Ajaxplorer, Joomla, Optware, phpMyAdmin, iStat, and the custom QPKG, Crashplan, to back up their data to the online cloud storage. All the QPKG applications advance the NAS and benefit ERMETHIC Design remarkably.