308 WIN, a leading trend and packaging design agency with offices in Berlin, Cologne, Aachen, Germany as well as New York and Switzerland, was looking for a solution to better manage its large volume of unstructured data. The company sought a solution that could offer flexibility and seamless growth at a cost that wouldn’t break the bank. The public cloud wasn’t going to cut it. But let’s back up for a second. Since coming on the scene 25 years ago, WIN has become known for its innovative, award-winning work. As the largest owner-managed (and female owned) trend and packaging design agency in the DACH market, the company’s longevity and impact is remarkable. It has built a reputation for having a strong employee culture, which WIN has been able to sustain even as it adds staff and office locations around the globe. With a motto like “Crazy about the future, obsessed with design,” it’s no surprise that the agency prides itself on being forward-looking. And that ethos extends to the technology they use. The challenge: Struggling with terabytes of unstructured data 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 “We lacked both a solution for effective storage consolidation and efficient storage scalability,” said Florian Lamberti, head of IT at WIN. 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. The solution: Scality RING S3 object storage delivers scale, security and low TCO “We’d been searching for suitable, highly scalable storage that could meet our needs,” said Lamberti. “After an open-ended analysis, we concluded that we needed S3-compatible object storage due to our high volume of data.” The company’s search led them to CTERA, the leading vendor in distributed cloud file storage, and from there, they learned about the success other CTERA customers had with Scality RING S3 object storage software. Scality RING delivers exceptional mixed-load performance with the ability to scale to billions of objects or files for millions of concurrent users. Thanks to RING, they never have to worry about system downtime due to hardware failures, maintenance windows or system upgrades. And the cherry on top? Maintaining a unified, simple-to-manage storage infrastructure reduces total cost of ownership. WIN chose a hybrid environment rather than going all-in on the public cloud due to two key factors. Improved operating costs: Due to the existing infrastructure, an on-prem installation was more cost-effective at the time of purchase. IT security and compliance: Managing the security requirements of large cloud applications can be very time-consuming and error-prone, which is why WIN decided to operate their own servers with their own infrastructure, where they are more experienced in using security tools. WIN’s complete solution consists of the CTERA file system and Scality RING S3 object storage, which also acts as a backup target for Veeam. The result of implementing Scality RING Lambert and the WIN team have been impressed by the solution’s scalability and availability — not to mention reliable and professional support from Scality. “The support provided by Scality is extremely good!” Lamberti reports. “The response times are very fast, and competent help is provided. Problems are often solved directly via VPN, so that the customer exerts little effort.” The WIN team is now free to dazzle clients with their creativity — without having to worry about the solution that stores and protects all their brilliant ideas. With this Scality success under its belt, WIN plans to distribute its mirrored RING across three locations, doubling its storage capacity.
