Architectural Consultancy HTA Selects Dot Hill

Dot Hill Systems Corp. has
been selected by HTA, a
multidisciplinary architectural and graphics design consultancy, to underpin
its move to virtualisation with Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN series of networked RAID
arrays.

Based in
London and Edinburgh, HTA has a multitude of in-house design disciplines and a number of residential and urban design contracts in place. Its IT
infrastructure supports graphic-intensive applications such as Bentley
MicroStation V8i, Autodesk Revit Structure Suite and Adobe Creative Suite,
which more than 100 designers rely on to run day in day out in order
to serve the company’s clients. Most of HTA’s large volume of CAD designs must
be retained for at least 20 years, and as such, data storage integrity over
time is vital to the consultancy’s business.

During 2010,
HTA realised that an upgrade of its IT systems was needed as its iSCSI-based
SAN was starting to fail; the team decided to turn to independent storage and
virtualisation reseller Krome
Technologies to help identify the most effective solution for its planned
refresh. After reviewing a number of options, Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN series of
networked RAID arrays was selected because of its combination of performance, affordability and scalability which, together, made it suited to HTA’s need for a flexible and virtualised environment.

The Dot Hill
AssuredSAN systems provide a future-proof foundation for the virtual server
estate at HTA thanks to their ability to scale in both capacity and performance
with re-use of the initial investment. These arrays now host 17TB of
live production data on SAS drives for performance and reliability, with
Ethernet providing the new data centre backbone. As part of the data centre
rebuild, HTA re-purposed its legacy SAN as tier two storage, providing
backup-to-disk for the VMware hosts using Veeam which is then archived to tape
using Symantec Backup Exec, backup and replication software that
allows application-based snapshots to be taken from the SAN.

This
combination has not only strengthened HTA’s storage and back-up strategy, but
also has improved the company’s productivity. Rapid network access to CAD
design files is crucial for the design teams and the move to a new iSCSI-based
SAN with the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 2332 has enabled an improvement in
productivity as Paul Leask, IT manager at HTA, explained: "With our legacy SAN, very large files were
taking up to ten minutes to open across the network and that would drive anyone
insane. After the move to Dot Hill we brought that down to just seconds; that
is impressive by any standards. In fact I have received excellent feedback on
the performance of our new SAN from many colleagues since we implemented the
new systems."