Safety First PPE Group

Background

Safety First PPE Group Sp. z o.o., together with its subsidiaries Prewenta Sp. z o.o. and Safety First Sp. z o.o., forms a leading Polish enterprise specializing in personal protective equipment and comprehensive occupational health and safety solutions. The company’s portfolio includes protective gloves, clothing, footwear, and modern systems that promote workplace safety culture. As part of the international Bunzl Group, Safety First PPE Group benefits from global innovation, strong quality standards, and operational stability to support customers across Europe.

Challenges

Over time, Safety First PPE Group’s business expanded, leading to the deployment of multiple key IT services. Network storage, EDI data, iSCSI volumes, and Docker-based applications were all running on a single NAS. However, a critical hardware failure on this NAS caused unexpected downtime, halting essential services such as Docker containers and SMB shares tied to the ERP system. The outage significantly disrupted daily operations and required emergency configuration of a temporary machine, data recovery from backups, and manual recreation of container environments. This incident underscored the urgent need for a redundant, fail-safe infrastructure that could sustain continuous operations even in the event of hardware failure.

Solution

With the support of Safety IT, QNAP’s authorized partner in Poland, Safety First PPE Group deployed a QNAP NAS High Availability (HA) cluster featuring two TS-h987XU-RP systems to eliminate single points of failure. The two NAS units were installed in separate rooms for redundancy.

• HA architecture: The NAS units, each installed with 25GbE SFP28 cards, are interconnected via 25GbE optical link and are also both connected to the same iSCSI switch using two separate 10GbE cables. Heartbeat real-time data synchronization is used to enable automatic failover in the event of an unexpected outage. The client on production sites can leverage high-speed 10GbE network interface for client workloads and indirectly enhance overall bandwidth efficiency across the NAS environment. One server room is secured by a backup power generator to further guarantee continuous operation.
• NAS storage: Each NAS combines high-capacity 3.5-inch HDDs with ultra-fast U.2 NVMe SSDs, delivering an optimal balance of performance and capacity for demanding workloads such as SMB file sharing, iSCSI storage, and containerized applications.

The full setup was implemented and tested by QNAP partner within a few days, ensuring smooth deployment and verification of automatic failover mechanisms.

Results

With QNAP’s Dual-NAS HA solution in place, Safety First PPE Group achieved a major leap in infrastructure reliability and business continuity.

• During hardware maintenance or failure, the standby NAS automatically takes over in as little as 90 seconds —minimizing downtime and preventing data loss.
• Key business services, including ERP attachments, Docker containers, and EDI systems, now operate without disruption.
• The HA configuration provides redundancy across two physically separate rooms, ensuring uninterrupted access to essential data and applications.
• By integrating high-speed 25GbE and 10GbE connectivity, both internal users and external partners enjoy smooth performance.

Thanks to QNAP, Safety First PPE Group can confidently continue its mission of promoting workplace safety—backed by an IT infrastructure that is as resilient as the protection products it delivers.