Down Madrid

Background

Down Madrid has collected images over the last 25 years, which portray its development as a social entity and conveys the work and emotions experienced during these years. These images have been stored on several external hard drives, containing a multimedia bank with 1.1 terabytes of data and over 82,000 digital resource files, which are mainly used to produce content and publications. This requires a significant investment of time to locate multimedia resources aimed at promoting Down Madrid's mission, such as newsletters, websites, and social media.

The biggest problem for Down Madrid was the annual report, for which most of the time was spent choosing photographs.

Challenges

Down Madrid's main challenge was to bring all the images together in a single space that would be secure and easy to access. They were also looking to replace portable hard disks with a solution that would be housed in a single data center and could not be lost.

Solution

Down Madrid contacted QNAP, as they felt that a NAS was the ideal solution for this need which, until now, they had not been able to meet due to the cost involved. A NAS met all their needs. Down Madrid were able to unify all of their resources in a single space and enjoy the data safety provided by setting up a RAID. Their users, both in their premises and working remotely, can also securely access the NAS using credential management, and organize and label the images using QuMagie.

Results

Down Madrid implemented a TS-1655 NAS with WD Red drives: four 8TB HDD (WD8003FFBX) and four SSD (WDS500G1R0A-68A4W0), configuring a hybrid environment supported with WD express memory (two M.2 NVMe WDS500G1R0C-68BDK0 drives) to facilitate quick access to media files. Thanks to WD Red drives, they were able to meet the capacity and speed requirements of the QNAP NAS. WD Red drives ensure a smooth workflow, as they feature NAS-optimized NASware firmware for NAS workloads and RAID environments. They also include noise and vibration protection sensors to ensure optimal performance within the TS-1655 NAS.

Once the hardware was installed, Down Madrid easily configured the software and began to migrate their content. After completing this process, thanks to QuMagie and its AI, they were able to start cataloging the images and accessing them.

This has resulted in an improved workflow, reduced working times, and a dramatic increase in security.