Nasuni Provides Global Architecture And Engineering Firm With Infinitely Scalable Primary Storage And Continuous Data Protection

Environmental Systems Design Now Has a Storage Solution That Automatically Protects Data Every Five Minutes and That it Will Never Outgrow

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Nasuni

Nov 24, 2014, 09:00 ET

NATICK, Mass., Nov. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Nasuni^®, a provider of enterprise storage to global organizations, today announced that Environmental Systems Design (ESD), a global consulting and engineering firm based in Chicago, and with additional offices in Abu Dhabi and the Dallas area, is using the Nasuni Service to provide global access and automatic protection for more than 15 TB of production data.

Click for a video interview with Mark Andersen, VP of Information Technology at ESD.

Video interview with Mark Andersen, VP of Information Technology at ESD, on how his firm has used The Nasuni Serive to protect, manage and provide access to 15 TB of production data.

ESD wasn't facing immediate challenges around storage capacity, but keeping data protection in line with primary storage growth was an enormous headache. The designers and engineers at ESD rely on workload-intensive programs such as AutoCAD and Revit. At any given time, there might be as many as 250 projects in the works, with 15 TB of data in production. ESD's prior data protection solutions were never able to keep pace.

"Our data growth was affecting our ability to protect the data," says Mark Andersen, VP of Information Technology at ESD. "Plus, we wanted to make sure that in the event our office was not available, we would still be able to access our data from any of our other global locations."

In addition, the firm's previous backup solutions taxed the network so severely that IT was forced to limit backups to nights and weekends, unless engineers needed to work overtime to finish an important project, in which case they would ask IT not to run backups at all due to the network overhead.

Finally, because ESD's clients often ask the firm to revisit old projects, files had to be stored indefinitely and recoverable on demand. Tape-based backup would take far too long to recover, and disk-based backup rapidly became cumbersome and expensive to scale. When his team suggested bulking up its existing disk-to-disk solution, Andersen balked at the price tag.

"I didn't want to spend $100,000 or more a year on backup alone," Andersen said. "That's a big budget item."

Andersen asked his team to look to the cloud for a solution, but their requirements were stringent. The solution needed to be easy and cost effective to scale as storage demands expanded, and data needed  to be protected in such a way that it would be accessible from anywhere in the event of a local disaster. Additionally, IT needed backup to run smoothly in the background without impacting the productivity of ESD's designers  and engineers. The firm's professionals demand enterprise performance at all hours, from any location, to work effectively, and IT wanted to be able to give end users both the protection and performance they deserved. Once Andersen and his team solidified their wish list, they determined that the Nasuni Service met every requirement.

After a proof-of-concept period, ESD took advantage of Nasuni's migration tool to test some of its less important data first. Once that was successful, the IT team began migrating 7 TB worth of critical production data from its storage arrays onto the Nasuni Service. ESD uses relative pathing in its newer AutoCAD files and direct pathing in some of the firm's older data, and all the pathings and links continued to work without a hitch. Once that data was migrated, IT re-mapped the system in one night and instructed everyone to reboot in the morning. Users didn't report any hiccups or performance issues, and all the connections and links in the complex program files worked properly.

"It's been as smooth a transition as I could have ever hoped for," Andersen said. "Once our users rebooted their machines to accept the new mapping to The Nasuni Service, they couldn't tell that anything had changed. But, believe me, from an IT point of view, it's a whole new world. I no longer have to worry about data protection and, even better, I've got an RPO that's counted in minutes, not in days."

"Storage and data protection have historically been housed in big iron in the corporate data center," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "That's no longer the case, thanks to the cloud. The Nasuni Service frees data and data protection from hardware to deliver powerful capabilities like automatic backup, instant restore, global access to an infinitely large storage volume and centralized management of the entire storage infrastructure. The future of storage is the Nasuni Service."

About Nasuni
Nasuni is an enterprise storage company that provides global organizations with a simple, unified storage solution. By combining on-premise hardware with cloud storage, Nasuni delivers a secure, all-in-one data storage solution that provides local performance for users, simplified and centralized management for IT, and an easily scalable, complete storage service for the global enterprise. Nasuni is privately held and based in Natick, Mass. For more information, visit www.nasuni.com.

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Jeff Miller	Wayne St. Amand
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Davies Murphy Group	Nasuni
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