Futures Church

Background

Futures Church, a global Christian congregation founded in 1922 in Adelaide, Australia, has grown to over 20 campuses worldwide. Known for its vibrant worship and strong emphasis on media production, Futures Church’s media, production, and business teams rely heavily on robust storage infrastructure to support high-resolution video editing and collaborative workflows. The IT environment supports around twenty staff using a mix of Windows PCs and Mac desktops connected through a 10GbE network backbone.

Challenges

Futures Church has relied on QNAP solutions for many years. Over time, their legacy systems (TS-1679U-RP, TS-EC1679U-RP, and REXP-1620U-RP) gradually began to show serious performance bottlenecks due to aging hardware and the explosive growth in file sizes — with many video files now exceeding 100GB per take. The older setup, with separate volumes for each department, also caused inefficiencies in collaboration and unnecessary file duplication. As 10GbE adoption increased among users, throughput limitations and storage constraints became critical roadblocks to continued media excellence.

Solution

To address growing performance and capacity limitations, Futures Church upgraded their IT infrastructure with a QNAP TS-h1677AXU-RP NAS and a TL-R2400PES-RP expansion unit. This consolidated four legacy devices into a single high-throughput system with dual 10GbE SFP+ connectivity (using QXG-10G2SF-X710 NIC) and SSD cache acceleration.

Working closely with QNAP’s ANZ support and design teams, the church configured the system using the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system. This enabled the creation of a unified, performance-optimized storage pool with department-level shared folders managed via Windows Active Directory.

To ensure performance, efficient operations and data protection, the deployment incorporated:

• SSD cache acceleration to boost read/write performance
• Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS3) for seamless onsite and offsite replication
• Active Directory integration for centralized user access control
• ZFS with QuTS hero to support snapshots, data integrity, and flexible volume management

The full deployment—including system setup, configuration, and RAID initialization—was completed in less than two days, with the core hardware ready within 3 hours!

“HBS 3 made it super easy to move our data from the old QNAP units to the new one. With real-time replication running in the background, our team kept working like usual, knowing everything was being safely replicated,” Ben Langberg shared enthusiastically.

Results

The upgraded NAS architecture delivered a massive leap in throughput, achieving over 1058 MB/s read speed via SMB. With a unified storage pool, departments can instantly transfer large files—such as 200GB of 4K video—without the overhead of moving data between separate volumes, all while maintaining AD-based folder permissions for secure access. This dramatically improved collaboration, media workflow speed, and eliminated previous performance bottlenecks.

Thanks to its scalability via JBOD expansion and support for 25GbE network upgrades, the system is future-ready — capable of scaling beyond 1PB of warm storage and adapting to higher bandwidth demands as needed.

“We designed the setup to fully utilize both 10GbE ports, with a clear path to upgrade to 25GbE via a QNAP SFP card if needed. The system gives us flexibility for future bandwidth expansion,” said Ben Langberg, appreciating the ease of upgrade planning.

The Media team now enjoys seamless editing and file access via 10Gbit connections, while the IT team benefits from a simplified, monitored, and resilient storage backbone. Looking ahead, Futures Church’s long-term goal is to deploy a multi-site, active/active QNAP storage system—ensuring data redundancy, high availability, and cross-site protection.