Unesco relies on Synology for remote office storage

Founded after the Second World War, Unesco seeks to promote peace by developing international cooperation in the fields of science, culture and education. Its headquarters are in Paris, but the organization also has 70 local offices, located on five continents. These offices do not always have a reliable connection to the Internet, and they sometimes struggle to connect to headquarters systems. For this reason, they wanted to have a local infrastructure to host and secure their files.

In order to meet this need, Unesco decided in 2018 to deploy packaged systems, making it possible to ensure both redundancy and backup at the local level. “The IT team wanted a solution that was reliable, homogeneous and economically competitive,” explains Jean-Victor Kingue, pre-sales engineer at Synology. The chosen system consists of two clustered Windows servers which host Hyper-V virtual machines, associated with two NAS servers, one dedicated to the storage of virtual machines, the other intended for backup. For the latter, Unesco has chosen solutions from Synology: a RackStation server provides LUN storage for six virtual machines, while a 4-bay NAS is dedicated to continuous backup of logical units.

Hyperconverged storage at headquarters level

In addition, the organization has deployed at headquarters a shared storage infrastructure, linked by VPN to the various offices. “In the event of a problem, the head office IT team can intervene remotely on the local servers”, emphasizes Jean-Victor Kingue. Unesco has also chosen to rely on a Synology solution, the FlashStation3017 NAS, which makes it possible to create iSCSI storage and a hyperconverged infrastructure. This NAS can accommodate up to 24 SSDs. “When Internet access is not guaranteed, the organization has also trained employees on site in order to be able to carry out maintenance and repairs”, adds Jean-Victor Kingue.

At headquarters level, Unesco also needed a backup infrastructure for around fifty workstations, servers and virtual machines. For this, the organization chose a DiskStation918 + server, supplemented by Synology Active Backup for Business software, provided free of charge. With this, the IT team can manage all backup tasks from a single console.