Our data-driven business world needs purpose-built data protection solutions that combine centralized management with a highly scalable architecture for best-in-class ease of use.

“In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses face unprecedented challenges in safeguarding their data,” said Philip Wong, Chairman and CEO of Synology.

Traditional centralized storage models are evolving as the need for shared data in the cloud and at the edge grows and as security threats put more pressure on vendors to address cyberthreats directly in storage systems, according to Forrester’s new report The State Of Storage, Global, 2024.

This is certainly true for companies such as the Toyota Motor Corporation.

Established in 1937, Toyota is considered the world’s largest automobile producer, manufacturing about 10 million vehicles annually. As one of the world’s leading manufacturing corporations, Toyota has been steadily expanding its business over the years.

In Vietnam, Toyota Motor Vietnam produces tens of thousands of vehicles annually. This growth in production scale has resulted in the need for more data storage for operation services and crucial data backups.

However, as their IT system’s capacity increased to hundreds of terabytes, the expansion had become a notable financial burden for the business.

Ensuring the continuous operation of their production system was crucial to maintaining their reputation and place in the market. To safeguard their data from potential threats like ransomware, natural disasters, and human errors, Toyota Motor Vietnam sought a disaster recovery solution. This would involve maintaining backups in a different location to ensure business continuity in the face of unforeseen events.

Cost-effective, streamlined data backup

After assessing options from different providers in the market, Toyota Motor Vietnam conducted a trial of Synology’s system and was impressed with its capabilities. This included solutions for backing up data at their headquarters, providing instant snapshot protection, and ensuring the availability of their file servers. Additionally, Synology proved instrumental in increasing the scalability of its entire infrastructure to accommodate future storage expansion.

At the company headquarters, they run several services on multiple VMs for daily operations. To keep these data secure and on premises, they utilized Synology Active Backup for Business to back up their entire 80TB virtual machine cluster to Synology’s petabyte-scale storage, SA3410, which is designed for growing storage needs.

To provide an extra layer of data protection, Toyota Motor Vietnam implemented additional daily offsite snapshots using Synology Snapshot Replication. Five identical 4-bay Synology RackStation units were set up at remote branches to serve as replication targets for data from the VM backup server. Immutable snapshot technology was also employed to mitigate security risks and manual failures.

To guarantee optimal operational performance and high availability (HA) for their essential data, Toyota Motor Vietnam deployed Synology’s UC SAN server and expansion units 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.

Comprehensive solution for enhances business resilience

Synology’s diverse range of applications seamlessly integrates with Toyota’s existing IT infrastructure, providing reliable solutions to safeguard the business. On-premises backups protect operational virtual environments, and additional layers of protection are extended through offsite backups using Synology’s Snapshot Replication technology. For their main file server, active-active SAN storage guarantees continuous production line service, safeguarding mission-critical and sensitive data while fortifying the overall resilience of the business.

Synology’s backup applications, designed with IT professionals in mind, offered simplified management without any additional software license fees. Compared to their previous backup setup, which involved hardware, software, and time-consuming maintenance, Toyota Motor Vietnam has achieved a substantial savings of 75% in the overall total cost of protecting its diverse enterprise workloads.

“Synology’s storage solution has increased our business resilience,” said Bui Ta Hoan, IT division head at Toyota Motor Vietnam. “Synology is reliable, secure, and provides future-proofing scalability for growing data needs.”

Data protection for the future

Based on Forrester’s 2023 survey data, the The State Of Storage, Global, 2024 report highlights major trends in enterprise storage adoption, including: 

• 57% of enterprise hardware tech decision-makers are adopting technologies like storage class memory (SCM) while 57% report adopting hyperconverged systems. Solid state drives (SSDs) stand out as a technology enterprises are adopting or planning to adopt (74%), as do external flash arrays (68%), and scale-out network-attached storage (NAS)/object storage systems (66%).
• 21% of respondents cited “big data” — an element of digital transformation efforts that includes data analytics and AI initiatives — as a contributor to data storage growth.
• More than 40% of enterprise respondents say their firm stores at least a petabyte of data. This number will only increase as more enterprises take advantage of generative AI and other associated technologies.
• Respondents worry about cloud data security and privacy, such as concerns about sensitive data leakage in public cloud-hosted genAI tools.

The report’s lead author, Forrester Senior Analyst Brent Ellis, said: “Growth in digital data is driving increased storage consumption for modern enterprises. That data is going to cloud locations by default, though performance-oriented needs largely driven by genAI and big data analytics maintain a market for high-performance storage in the data center. Worries about security, privacy, and compliance weigh on the mind of buyers but are mitigated by increasingly sophisticated offerings by storage vendors and cloud providers. Outsourced storage management and storage as a service offerings help reduce complexity for businesses that must streamline technology investments and focus on core business initiatives.”

So what lies ahead for companies like Toyota? How could they scale up data management and protection in a fast-evolving data-driven business landscape?

Synology recently announced new ActiveProtect appliances, a purpose-built data protection lineup that combines centralized management with a highly scalable architecture for best-in-class ease of use.

“Organizations are tasked with maintaining overly complex and costly data protection strategies, and we aim to solve all the challenges at once with ActiveProtect,” said Jia-Yu Liu, Executive Vice President at Synology. “ActiveProtect is the culmination of extensive research, development, and experience working with our customers.”