Background
Techpoint is a publicly listed fabless semiconductor company developing high-definition (HD) video technology for video surveillance systems and automotive infotainment systems. With design centers at multiple US locations, as well as offices in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea, Techpoint has become one of the leaders in its target market.
The Growing Enterprise
According to market research and analysis, the global video surveillance market will be $75 billion by the year 2022 with high-definition video being its fastest-growing segment. The IC industry is an important part of the total supply chain as it provides the underlying hardware and software for image capture and transmission.
Techpoint started with a core team in San Jose, California. As business developed, a geographically distributed organization was quickly established in the US and Asia with R&D, Engineering, Operations, and Sales functions.
Multiple-Office Collaboration
The company has grown to include multiple offices across several countries, making it more difficult to centrally protect and share critical files throughout the organization. To protect Techpoint’s Intellectual Property, a robust, centralized storage solution that ensures all files are protected from data loss, regardless of which location it originated from, is paramount. Techpoint requires a managed and secure storage environment that ensures IT management and control, and protects the integrity of all files through file locking and version control.
To maximize Techpoint’s business efficiency as it continues to grow, an effective way to share a wide range of digital assets – including design files, testing, and engineering documents – across global cross-functional teams is critical. Furthermore, there is often a need to share content with external teams and partners. The large file sizes generated by high-definition video and the nature of distributed teams makes file sharing and collaboration challenges.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
As an underlying hardware platform provider, Techpoint works with a number of world-class manufactures and system integrators. Data backup and disaster recovery (DR) plays a very important part in certification and regulatory compliance, keeping Techpoint a qualified supplier to these partners. Currently, the IT staff performs “D2D2D” backup and takes the USB disk offsite for disaster recovery purposes. It’s a time consuming and human-driven process.
Making It Work
After comparing several solutions, Techpoint selected Morro Data Cloud NAS for its blend of features, performance, and cost. Delivering all the benefits of the cloud coupled with the advantages of on-premises storage, the ability to share files across multiple locations, and drive letter access to all files at LAN speeds, CloudNAS provides everything Techpoint needs in a storage solution at a price they can afford. Techpoint deployed Cloud NAS in three office locations.
User adoption was straightforward with Active Directory and the familiar NAS interface eliminating the need for user training. Users in remote offices can now share files and collaborate between design teams and departments. At the same time, all files are safely stored in the cloud with complete IT visibility and control.
Cloud NAS helps Techpoint protect its intellectual property using location-based access permission. This feature allows the company to regulate access based upon the location of the user, including which office he is located in, and whether he is on- or off-premises.
With Cloud NAS Cache & Sync technology, the challenge of large video file sharing is solved; files are saved to the Cloud NAS CacheDrive at LAN speeds and the CacheDrive then takes care of the upload in the background.
Techpoint also replaced their old multi-step on-premises and offsite backups by using a simple script to back everything up to the CacheDrive for an immediate off-site storage solution. With its cloud-first storage architecture and Cache & Sync technology, Cloud NAS greatly simplifies storage, automatically performs all backups in the background for a seamless cloud backup solution, and all files can be immediately and continuously accessed by multiple users at LAN speeds, using their regular broadband connection.
An ideal solution for Techpoint will provide:
- Global access to centralized data in the cloud.
- Good performance for accessing large files.
- Offsite backup for DR and regulatory compliance.
- Simple deployment and ease of use.
- Security, reliability, and scalability.
- Ease of deployment to new sites.
- Cloud-based management.
The Result
Techpoint is so pleased with the benefits and performance delivered by Cloud NAS, they now have plans to deploy Cloud NAS to all corporate sites to continue their data migration to the cloud.
Jim Yeh, Techpoint’s IT Director, explains: “We are a disruptive technology company offering the most innovative video solution. When implementing the IT infrastructure, we need something innovative too so that we do more with less. Morro Data Cloud NAS fits that bill. The Techpoint workload is a typical distributed enterprise. Cloud NAS delivers the enterprise-class solution we need, without the enterprise cost and management overhead.”