Australia's Mantra Hotels moves workloads and upgrades backup with all-flash from Synology

Australia’s biggest hotel marketer and operator Mantra Group will replace ageing storage facilities across 91 of its Australian hotels with Synology storage infrastructure this year.

The project, initiated last year and assisted by Brisbane Synology partner MOQdigital, will see Mantra move active workloads for the initial 91 hotels, covering about 5000 staff, to a range of the storage vendor’s solutions, including FS3017 all-flash arrays in its two main data centres and on-premises spinning-based arrays over the next six months.

Mantra IT infrastructure manager Mark Pearce said the company expected to eventually use Synology arrays across all of its hotels to replace an incumbent backup solution.

“This will afford savings in multiple areas, and provide multiple layers of redundancy through versioning, data usage reduction and replication,” he said. “We still have other vendor storage in place and this move to Synology is a full replacement in some areas, and, in the case of the all flash, an extension of our BCP and DR capabilities.”

After several months of trialling the technology, Mantra was satisfied the FS3017’s served “as well as enterprise level all-flash arrays at a fraction of the cost”.

“[We saw] extremely high performance at a relatively low cost compared to other vendors, with good support during and after the trial period,” Pearce said.

Mike Chen, sales director at Synology, said the Mantra roll out was an important step in the storage vendor’s new strategy.

“Synology’s FlashStation FS3017 has allowed Mantra to enjoy a high-performance All-Flash solution for less than $20,000. This competitive price is a result of the FS3017's wide range of SSD compatibility which provides more flexibility to suit our different customers’ needs, while being affordable for even SMBs alike,” he said.

“The Mantra All-Flash project is extremely crucial for Synology. It allowed us to demonstrate that Synology is stepping confidently and aggressively into the enterprise market with a solution that provides the proven performance and services required by that market.”

Mantra has about 5500 staff and more than 20,000 rooms under management for owners in properties across Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.