THE BIG SHORT

Background

THE BIG SHORT sp. z o.o. sp. k. provides IT infrastructure management, server administration, and storage services for several organizations, including Climatic—a leading Polish manufacturer of modular buildings. Their team supports critical network, virtualization, and data environments relied on daily by hundreds of users across office, production, and design departments. Ensuring stable, secure, and scalable access to data is essential for enabling demanding CAD/BIM workflows and keeping key business operations running without interruption.

As data volumes grew, user counts increased, and project workloads became more complex, the limitations of THE BIG SHORT’s existing storage environment became evident. Their single-node NAS was nearing its limits in both performance and reliability, revealing structural risks that could no longer be ignored.

Challenges

The most pressing issue was that the legacy NAS had become a critical single point of failure for the entire organization. Any restart, hardware problem, or performance degradation immediately disrupted access to shared files, impacting design teams, production workflows, and office operations. These outages ranged from several minutes to several hours. For departments working on shared technical documentation, even short periods of unavailability halted work entirely. Each incident forced the IT team into “firefighting mode,” while routine maintenance carried the same risk of prolonged downtime.

It became clear that the existing setup could no longer support the organization’s expectations for reliability, performance, or business continuity. THE BIG SHORT needed true high availability, predictable failover, and room to scale—without rebuilding their entire architecture. These requirements ultimately led them to evaluate and adopt QNAP’s High Availability solution.

Solution

With the support of mobil-team, QNAP’s authorized partner in Poland, THE BIG SHORT deployed a dual-node high-availability cluster built on QNAP TS-h1090FU all-flash NAS running QuTS hero. Equipped with enterprise-grade SSDs and connected via high-speed 10/25GbE links, the new architecture provides a fast, resilient data environment for all users and application servers. Network interfaces were separated for user traffic, backup, management, and the cluster heartbeat to ensure consistent performance and reliability.

QNAP High Availability Manager orchestrates the active-standby configuration and provides a unified virtual IP address, making failover seamless and virtually invisible to end users. Paired with snapshots and integration with the existing backup system, THE BIG SHORT can now perform maintenance, switch testing, and system enhancements safely and without downtime.

Result

With QNAP’s High Availability cluster in place, THE BIG SHORT has reached a new level of stability and resilience across its storage environment. Design and production teams now enjoy continuous, high-speed access to large CAD/BIM files — free from the disruptions that once slowed projects or halted work altogether. For the IT department, maintenance and updates can finally be carried out in a controlled, stress-free manner, without risking downtime or interrupting operations.

As IT Leader Tomasz Matejuk highlights, “The QNAP HA cluster has provided us with stable and fast access to data, significantly reduced downtime, and allowed maintenance without impacting users.”

The result is a smart, future-ready investment: a high-performance, cost-efficient HA architecture that eliminates bottlenecks, safeguards business continuity, and empowers the organization to scale confidently as its data demands continue to grow.