Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity

Background

The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (GOCC) is Poland’s best-known non-profit, supporting public healthcare for over 33 years. Its flagship initiative, the Grand Finale, is a one-day charitable fundraiser held every January, mobilizing volunteers and donors across the country. Over its history, GOCC has raised nearly PLN 2.3 billion and donated more than 78,500 pieces of medical equipment to hospitals and clinics nationwide.

In addition to the Grand Finale, the organization also hosts the Pol’and’Rock Festival, one of Europe’s largest open-air music festivals, further amplifying its cultural and social impact. With such high-profile events, reliable IT infrastructure is essential.

(Photo source: Marcin Zielinski)

Challenges

Organizing these massive events generates enormous volumes of media files—from live broadcasts to recorded performances and news coverage. This presented several challenges:

• High-capacity storage to accommodate growing multimedia archives.
• Secure data management to protect valuable and sensitive content.
• Seamless file sharing with internal teams and external partners.
• Uninterrupted availability during live events, where even a moment of downtime could mean lost opportunities.

GOCC needed a solution that could balance scale, reliability, and collaboration without compromising performance.

Solution

After testing various providers over the years, GOCC selected QNAP NAS as the foundation of its IT infrastructure. Their deployment included:

• A 30-bay TS-h3087XU-RP with HDD/SSD hybrid storage as the primary archival system.
• Two 12-bay TS-h1277AXU-RP NAS configured with QNAP High Availability Manager, creating an active-standby cluster that guarantees uninterrupted service.
• Additional tower NAS with Kingston SSDs, used during the Grand Finale and Pol’and’Rock Festival, providing high-performance and reliable storage for on-site media operations.

The adoption of QuTS hero with the ZFS file system further enhanced data security, offering data deduplication, efficient organization, and protection against silent data corruption—critical for safeguarding large volumes of multimedia files.

Result

With QNAP High Availability, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity can run its most important events without fear of interruptions. Live broadcasts, nationwide fundraising campaigns, and everyday operations now rest on a rock-solid IT foundation, while ZFS-powered NAS preserves decades of multimedia archives with integrity and security.

Most importantly, the IT team can focus less on preventing problems and more on enabling GOCC’s vision—to bring people together, raise hope, and support healthcare in Poland. With QNAP, their data is not just protected; it’s part of a larger story of lives changed and communities strengthened.