WIN's bread and butter is creating strong, eye-catching imagery for its clients — a process that requires large data stores for ever-changing visual graphics and high-quality design files. With teams spread across several locations, WIN produces enormous amounts of visual assets and high-impact design data.
As the company grew, two technical storage challenges emerged:
- Teams at all locations required sufficient high-performance production
- Growing volumes of data required a secure, highly scalable, and cost-effective backup storage environment
The agency experimented with individual NAS systems at various office locations but got mixed results. The administration was simple, but the systems quickly reached their capacity limits and were difficult to expand. Cross-site access was only possible via VPN and local network protocols.
After investigating different solutions, the WIN team identified several shortcomings:
Ability to scale capacity was limited. The NAS systems could only be expanded to a limited extent. "As pooling at network level was not possible, we regularly reached the capacity limits of the systems," Lamberti said. New systems had to be purchased regularly, which was an expensive, complex, and time-consuming process due to the high volume of data.
Data was siloed in different systems. Production data was stored on local NAS systems. As data often had to be processed across multiple locations, this led to time-consuming copying processes, some of which had to be carried out manually. If different file versions were being worked on at two different locations, data had to be consolidated — a laborious undertaking. The protocols used weren't intended for transfer in networks with high latencies, which made file transfer between the locations even more difficult.
Backup processes were high touch: Individual NAS systems had to be backed up in the agency's offices, and those backups had to be monitored and checked regularly.
CUSTOMERS & MIDMARKET
About WIN
The Challenge
Solution
The Results
