Tagoju

Background

Tagoju is a supermarket chain in Shizuoka, Japan. As their dedication is to the community, including providing on-site day nursery for employees' children, Tagoju is the store loved by locals. To ensure security for staff, customers, and kids at the stores and day nursery, they are making efforts to improve IT systems including surveillance.

Challenges

For surveillance systems
Tagoju had been using camera vendor’s dedicated recorders in stores, warehouses, and parking lots. However, multiple recorders were piled up in a narrow space of the back office, so they took up a lot of space and were difficult to access in the event of hardware issues. Those recorders also had restrictions on supported cameras and disks, plus limitations on data extraction when they had to review recordings, making Tagoju inflexible.

For file servers
Tagoju had been using other vendors’ NAS and Windows Server for more than 10 years, but had the following problems:

• Difficulty in restoring data and system environments when replacing servers.
• Windows Server file sharing does not have a Recycle Bin, making it difficult to restore data after it has been deleted.
• Some NAS products do not support access log functions, making them insecure.
• Hard to detect disk failures, so urgent action is required upon discovering a failure.
• Limited disk compatibility forced them to select a product from narrow choices, and reduced flexibility for the application and budget.

Solution

Tagoju's IT staff selected QNAP solutions for surveillance, file, and backup servers. The entire supermarket chain now operates a total of 31 rackmount and desktop QNAP NAS units, including the TS-873A NAS, and between 10 and 80 cameras are installed per store for monitoring and recording.

Result

For surveillance systems
The IT manager at Tagoju says, "I never had the idea of using a NAS as a surveillance system." Today, QVR Pro is installed on the QNAP NAS and saves recordings from security cameras. QVR Center is used for centralized management of the recordings, and the status of each floor is simultaneously monitored in real-time. The QVR Pro Client utility is installed on a Windows PC in the office to view the recordings. Data can be easily extracted at high speed via Explorer, reducing a lot of the time and effort.

Thanks to QNAP surveillance solutions supporting a large number of cameras, Tagoju centralized the recorders into a single NAS, which helped to keep the space in the office tidy. As QNAP is compatible with wide range of IP camera brands (including Panasonic, Axis, and Dahua) Tagoju is not limited to just one vendor, resulting in reduced costs. Even for cameras not currently listed on the compatibility list, recording is basically possible with any ONVIF-compatible IP camera, and since QNAP's support team can verify compatibility upon request, Tagoju has had no worries about compatibility so far.

Since the same surveillance system is installed in the day nursery, IT staff were able to set up the system without any hassle. It is reassuring to know that even in the event of a system failure, the accumulated know-how can be used to quickly address the problem. By deploying a surveillance system that is easy for anyone to use, children and staff can be protected, and as a result, Tagoju employees can work with peace of mind.

For file and backup servers
Tagoju uses multiple QNAP NAS for different purposes - one is used as a file server for staff, and the other, a high-speed NAS with a 10GbE port, is being used as a backup server for a shared storage server running a critical database.

QNAP brings Tagoju peace of mind by knowing in the event of a HDD failure, the QNAP NAS immediately notifies the IT staff, making it easy to handle and plan for replacement. If the NAS itself fails and requires replacement, IT staff only need to add the existing disks to the replacement QNAP NAS, minimizing downtime. In the future, if the storage capacity is almost full, Tagoju only need to add more disks, and there is no need to shut down the system.

QNAP also allows them to check the access logs, which was not possible with the other vendors' previous NAS, allowing them to monitor whether important business data is being handled properly.

Although QNAP can be used for a variety of purposes, Tagoju's IT staff was also impressed by how easy it was to set up and manage. Even for a first-time user, no problems were encountered, and after a few hours of installation and an overnight RAID build, they could install QNAP on site the next day.