Difoosion

Background

Difoosion, created in 2011 is a network of blogs that focuses mainly on technology. There are five portals that operate in Spanish: Andro4all.com, Alfabetajuega.com, Urbantecno.com, ipadizate.com and es.ign.com, which serve as information sources for millions of people every month.
Over the years, Difoosion has enjoyed exponential growth, which can be seen in the inclusion of three of its portals in a number of the most respected national newspapers. Its aim is to continue expanding its physical presence, while at the same time maintaining its commitment to providing relevant and high quality content to an ever growing audience.

Challenges

The company was faced with a number of challenges, which led them to choose a QNAP NAS. Firstly, the nature of the work involved the generation of a large quantity of multimedia content, such as images and video files, raising the issue of the need to efficiently store and manage these large files.

The team were located in various cities, which required the efficient and secure sharing of files amongst members, irrespective of their location. Operating systems and internal developments were constantly being tested in order to improve both the CMS as well as web page design, requiring a robust and flexible system that would adapt to changing needs.

Finally, the growth of the business and expansion of their projects lead to the company searching for a solution that could grow with them, requiring a platform capable of managing the increased workload and volume of data, without compromising performance or security.

Solution

Before adopting the QNAP NAS, there were concerns regarding the efficiency, security and costs of the data storage methods. The adoption of the QNAP NAS TVS-h474 allowed these concerns to be addressed, as well as significantly improving data storage operations.

QNAP was shown to be an effective storage solution, characterized by its ease of installation, which allowed data storage systems to be put into operation quickly. In just a few clicks, it allowed a RAID to be set up, with snapshots for secure backup, operating systems running in Virtualization Station and Docker services hosted with Container Station. With a large storage capacity, QNAP enables secure access and sharing of various assets, improving the team's efficiency. Its integral backup system provides security and peace of mind, with the ability to recover data via snapshots. The data transfer speed, using 2.5Gb connections with aggregation, improves upon other NAS, speeding up file management. Furthermore, its ease of use for the editing team, with automatic synchronizing of files, and the option of a NVMe SSD for caching, optimizes workflows.

Results

The use of the QNAP NAS has significantly boosted the long-term potential of the company. Future growth has been secured thanks to the potentially limitless expansion provided by QNAP, either via the addition of further hard drives, NAS such as the TVS-h474 compatible models, or via myQNAPcloud Storage. This flexibility has enabled adaption to any event without major hindrance. In addition, storage capacity has tripled, simplifying operations and reducing costs. The centralizing of backups has improved security and efficiency, eliminating the need for local copies.

The use of the Virtualization Station has simplified operating system tests, allowing centralized experiments and testing without needing local installations as well as boosting development. The ability to run services in Docker via Container Station can be highlighted as a valuable feature, which improves security and benefits the internal operations that use Docker. This avoids the need for a complex infrastructure for internal tools.

Finally, Difoosion highlighted the number of QNAP’s own applications in the App Center, including tools such as Malware Remover to delete infected files, or the ability to install WordPress with just one click to easily test plugins and themes, without having to use more complex developer environments.

In summary, the QNAP NAS has become an essential tool for long term growth, efficiency and security, enabling technological tests and the ongoing development at the company.