Arup Signs with Copan

Arup, the global design, engineering and planning firm and creative force behind many of the world’s most innovative projects and structures such as the Beijing Olympic Stadium, Heathrow Terminal 5 and the Sydney Opera House, has selected COPAN Systems to backup its entire European email messaging infrastructure.

Having recently consolidated its email system in Europe from over 20 dispersed systems to just two central repositories, Arup faced a significant backup challenge that its legacy tape storage infrastructure could no longer scale to cope with. In order to protect its email, Arup has selected a high-availability COPAN Systems 300T Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with built-in SIR de-duplication.

COPAN Systems’ Enterprise MAID platform is fundamentally different from transactional storage arrays, in that it is purpose-built for persistent data. It also uses ultra-dense disk configurations enhanced using MAID technology. COPAN powers off disks that have no outstanding IO requests, thus reducing power consumption by around 85%.

Steven Capper, Associate Director & Europe Region IT Leader, Arup says: "Data backup and recovery is mission-critical for our business. Having experienced a number of tape restore failures in the past, we knew we needed to troubleshoot the problem by selecting a flexible, dense and scalable storage platform with a high density footprint and low power consumption. COPAN Systems came to us with a unique proposition — the capacity, density and power metrics of a traditional tape silo with the performance, data integrity and ease of access of a disk array. This gives us a higher quality of service than we previously had so when it came to the decision, it was no contest."

The COPAN Systems VTL completes Arup’s data protection strategy and will mean that its high volumes of persistent data will be available for restore 24/7/365 and that backup windows can be achieved out of core production hours. The COPAN Systems VTL now supports the existing storage infrastructure which creates point-in-time copies of data for offsite replication and will hold historical backup data.

"Managing disk space, backing up data and running out of disk space are just a few of the challenges that are faced by any company with such high volumes of persistent data as Arup. Its engineers and designers need quick and easy access to archived data contained in emails such as parametric designs, engineering calculations and CAD drawings. At COPAN Systems, we’re seeing high demand for our pioneering MAID-based persistent data storage solutions and are delighted to be working in partnership with Arup’s world-class European team of engineers and design consultants to help them deliver engineering excellence," says Martin Cooper, Director of systems engineering, EMEA, COPAN Systems.

Arup’s work touches on many aspects of modern life; clients and communities around the world can see examples of the company’s work in many high profile urban environments, buildings, efficient transport links and infrastructure. Arup’s footprint is at the heart of many projects including the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, London’s Stansted Airport, the Swiss Re building and Millennium Bridge in London, Heathrow Terminal 5, the Sydney Opera House, the Denver Millennium Footbridge & Art Museum, Fulton Street Transit Centre and Gates Foundation Headquarters in New York as well as the impressive Beijing Olympic Stadium & Swimming Pool.

Over the last 12 months, COPAN Systems has seen a step change in market demand. This has resulted in over 250 enterprise customer installations in 17 countries across five continents. These installations, ranging from 100 TBs to an increasing number of multi-petabyte solutions, tripled COPAN Systems’ revenues in the last year. Customers include Comcast, Warner Brothers, Time Warner, Western Union, Qwest, Hewitt, NASDAQ, Facebook, MySpace, NASA and multiple federal accounts. In EMEA, the company is also seeing significant growth with customers such as British Telecom, Credit Agricole, Canal+, Novartis and Credit Suisse. In the future, Arup is also looking at expanding the system to cover additional storage infrastructures and replicate between Arup offices.