Marketing Firm HB Design Switches From DVDs to Thecus NAS

The staff at
HB Design, Inc. hated being pulled away from creative work to perform the tedious and
time-consuming job of archiving.

They spent hours each week manually copying
project files to DVDs when they would rather have been coming up with the next
big idea for clients.

Files Keep
Getting Bigger
HB Design is
a marketing communications firm in Portland, Oregon, that helps Fortune 500 and
small businesses alike define and develop visual and messaging brand
strategies. The firm has 19 employees and a project office in Chandler,
Arizona.

About half of the firm’s computers are Windows operating
system-based PCs, used by web developers, account managers, and project
managers, and half are Apple computers used by designers. Most of the company’s
files are enormous media files-some up to a half gigabyte-that just keep
getting bigger. "Every year, the
files get larger as images become higher resolution and animations become more
complex," says Chris Barry, Network Administrator and Web Developer at
HB Design. "We have a whole room
full of production servers that store jobs we’re working on day to day, and we
need to keep those servers at peak performance for everyday use."

Eating Up Creative Time
HB Design preserved its production servers by copying
finished jobs onto DVDs for archival storage. However, moving files on and off
DVDs consumed a lot of time – more than two hours per DVD. Some animations
consumed 10 or more DVDs, which meant that the archival staff spent hours and
hours copying files, duplicating the disc, and verifying data integrity. When
employees needed to pull an old job, more time was needed to check out the
needed DVDs and reload the job onto the production server and their own
computer.

"Chris and other
staff members were spending about 10 hours a month burning DVDs, which was time
not spent on client projects," says Noma Hanlon, President of HB
Design. "We wanted to minimize the
time spent on backup and maximize staff time doing web development and project
management."

Sometimes, a DVD would be misplaced, not burn properly, or
fail. One time, the DVD manufacturer notified the firm that ‘DVD rots’
had affected its product, and the agency had to reburn all its archival
DVDs which took the better part of a weekend.

High-Capacity Plug-In Solution
In early 2011, HB Design began looking for a better archival
solution.

"The next logical step was
to go to Blu-Ray, which would give us more capacity per disk but still saddle
us with all the copying time and the reliability pitfalls of optical disks,"
Barry says.

Moving to an archival server with hard drives was another
alternative, but servers are expensive, take time to set up, and require
operating system licenses.

HB Design needed a storage solution that would work with its
Windows-based network, provide enough bandwidth to transfer files quickly, and
offer enough storage space (at least 10 terabytes) to meet the agency’s future
needs.

"We’ve reduced
the time spent on backup by 85 percent. This gives my staff more time for
creative work." said Noma Hanlon, President, HB Design.

HB Design settled on the Thecus N4200PRO
NAS device. It is based on the
Intel Atom processor, with 1 gigabyte of DDR3 RAM.

"With an Intel processor inside, file transfers are blazingly fast,"
Barry says. "The system doesn’t
break a sweat when you’re transferring files to it."

Thecus gave HB Design an inexpensive way to get terabytes of
storage, quickly.

"The NAS unit is ready
to go, out of the box," says Robert Wallace, Technical Director at HB
Design. "The operating system is
pre-installed, and all the services are ready to go. You load the hard drives
[purchased separately], plug it in, log into the web-based management console,
and configure the storage you need. It took Chris 20 minutes to set it up."

Also, the Thecus NAS has RAID technology and hot-swappable
drives to provide data protection, and a battery backup to
protect the drives in case of power failure. HB Design obtained two Thecus NAS
devices and mirrors all files to the second unit on a nightly basis. This gives
the company protection in case anything happens to one of the devices.

Backup Time Reduced 85 Percent, Productivity Boosted
Today, archival work takes about 10 minutes per job, versus
the dozens of hours required before. When a job is finished, the designer
cleans up the job files and lets Barry know that the job is ready for
archiving. Barry and his team  transfer the files to the NAS. When a designer
needs to resurrect an old job, he or she connects to the NAS on the network and
copies the needed files-with the Intel Atom processor making the transfer
nearly instantaneous.

"We’ve reduced
the time spent on backup by 85 percent," Hanlon says. "This gives my staff more time for creative
work. The Thecus NAS has freed up an entire staff member from archiving duties.
With these productivity gains, the Thecus systems paid for themselves in three
months."

More Mileage Out of Production Servers, Higher Reliability
Having a NAS helps HB Design preserve its expensive
production servers by providing a way to whisk finished jobs to
archival storage. Because of the work involved in copying DVDs, staff members
sometimes let jobs linger on those servers.

The firm also has a more reliable archival system.
"There’s so much that can go wrong
with DVDs: the burning process can fail, the media can degrade, even pulling
DVDs in and out of the paper sleeves can damage data," Barry says.
"We don’t have to worry about any of
that with hard drives. We have deep faith in the reliability of the Thecus NAS
devices and the Intel processors inside."

Room to Grow
HB Design no longer needs to stock up on
and store stacks and stacks of DVDs. "At
our current rate of consumption, the Thecus NAS gives us years of growing room,"
Hanlon says. "That contributes to a
great ROI on a great product."