01 October 2017

Founded in 1971, Peers Hardy Group (PHG) is a supplier of own-label watches for many high street fashion chains. It designs and distributes watches for retailers such as Next, Argos, Amazon and Disney, as well as fashion brands such as Radley, Orla Keily and Ice Watch. 

Headquartered in the West Midlands, the 170-strong company has extended its own watch range by introducing the Henry London brand. To support this expansion, PHG invested heavily in offices and manufacturing facilities in China and Hong Kong. This prompted a rethink about what shape its IT infrastructure should take.

The company had implemented a Microsoft Azure Backup Server and wanted storage technology that would dovetail with this, as IT manager Mark Griffiths explains: “We had a number of options from the storage perspective but ultimately wanted to centralise storage for the UK and the Far East into a single device. Specifically, we wanted a main interface between local and cloud backups. This would give us the opportunity to downsize our existing Windows server environment at some locations to reduce costs, maintenance requirements and energy consumption.”

The group had been using Buffalo Technology’s storage for a number of years, and had also recently implemented several of the vendor’s TeraStation WS5600DR2 Windows Storage Server 12TB units which it was mainly using as file servers across its branch offices. 

As the company was exploring its storage options, the TeraStation WSH5610 (pictured) immediately caught Griffiths’ attention: “We do multiple backups through the day to our cloud-based disaster recovery platform running in Azure. The TeraStation has monster throughput capacity which is precisely what we needed.” 

The WSH5610 is configured by default with hardware RAID 6, though other RAID options are available. It also supports 3.5-inch SATA drives which are hot-swappable and facilitate automatic RAID rebuild. Optional AES 128-bit encryption is also supported. 

According to Buffalo, the device’s “simple and intuitive” management interface is designed for good integration with business networks, and also gives administrators extensive control over users’ permissions.