Environmental Systems Design Using Nasuni Service

Nasuni Corp. announced that Environmental Systems Design, Inc. (ESD), a consulting and engineering firm based in Chicago, IL, 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 15TB of production data.

ESD wasn’t facing immediate challenges around storage capacity, but keeping data protection in line with primary storage growth was an 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 15TB 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 IT, 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.“

He 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 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 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 metevery 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 7TB 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, 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.“

Video interview with Mark Andersen, VP of IT, ESD