Aurecon Selects Moonwalk

Aurecon Group Brand (Pte) Ltd
provides engineering, advisory and project management services for public and
private sector clients.

With a history dating back to 1932, it has an operations network extending
across twenty six countries and has been involved in projects in over 80
countries across Africa, AsiaPac, the Middle East and Americas. Aurecon
employs around 7,500 people over 11 industry groups.

Challenge: Managing Project Data in
Geographically Distributed Organisation
Aurecon
generates a large amount of unstructured data ranging from Office and
project management style documentation through to engineering design files and
large 2D/3D modeling data sets. Being a project oriented organisation means
that Aurecon needed to adopt a varied approach to data lifecycle management.

There is also a major compliance factor particularly in the area of contract,
design and drawing where the data needs to be kept ‘in
perpetuity’ to varying degrees
depending upon contract and legislative requirements.

With two main data centres and a geographically distributed office network,
keeping this data distributed throughout the offices makes the effective
management of these data sets a very expensive challenge, particularly with
respect to both production storage and backup media.

The existing storage environment is predominantly EMC Corp. including SAN and Centera object store devices.

Addressing the Problem
"Having recently performed a
storage refresh, we were able to define a cost per MB on our production,
archive, DR, and backup data sources"
said Greg Walker, manager, design and infrastructure. "Then, by using Moonwalk, Inc. initially
to analyse the unstructured data, we were able to determine several things.
Firstly, we were able to plot the exponential growth rate of data over the next
five years with a degree of confidence. Secondly we could see that more than
50% of our current data was more than two years old – and suitable for
immediate archive using Moonwalk."

A sound understanding of data holdings is key to determining the
best way forward and most importantly, to determine the ROI to
be achieved through implementation of a data management solution.

Greg continues: "Using
these statistics allowed us to calculate that the cost of moving the data that
was older than two years to the cheaper archive storage tier would only cost
30% of what it would be to leave that data on the production storage and cater
for the ongoing backup of that data. In fact this showed a ROI
in approximately 18 months across the storage tiers."

Selection Process
Aurecon invested time and effort
in the selection process. Using a detailed specification requirement the
company entered into an evaluation process across a number of products. This
process involved running the various products in a proof of concept environment
to test how the software behaved and to confirm suitability.

"Most of these products were not
able to natively cater for the cross referenced drawing files and documents
that are core to our business," said Greg. "There are significant advantages attached to the unique architecture of
Moonwalk. Moonwalk
has a very light weight footprint. We were able to complete the design, the
implementation, and transition as a live operational service within a few
weeks."

Moonwalk, Enterprise Data
Management Platform
That ‘Loads and Goes’
In November 2012, Aurecon in
Melbourne moved to its new building, the Aurecon Centre in the Docklands. Prior to the move, they decided to use the Melbourne office as the Moonwalk
pilot site and do a little stress testing in the hope that this would mean less
data for the Infrastructure Team to physically relocate when relocating the
office.

"We moved about 12TB down the
primary WAN link in an initial four week period but it took us a little while
to understand how to really utilise the link size,"
says Greg. "We learnt quite a bit in that time
about tuning the Moonwalk software to find the sweet spot."

Moonwalk can be tuned to takean effective utilisation of
the network and/or to work most cooperatively with other users application
software.

As Greg says: "Obviously
you want to push as much Moonwalk data down your link as you can but you don’t
want to negatively affect other traffic on that link, so we spent some time
with getting the balance correct. Then over that quiet period Christmas
provides us, we deployed Moonwalk to all remaining sites. We learnt how to
really ‘smash’ our WAN links and were able to ingest over 90TB of data in to
our Centera Archive Storage. Data is now archived on a continuing basis
according to Aurecon’s data management policies."

Moonwalk From an Operational Perspective
Given
Aurecon’s global footprint there is quite a variety in WAN link sizes and
eligible data for archiving across the various sites.

According to Greg: "The beauty of Moonwalk is that
once you have tuned the ‘walkers’ to the sweet spot for that link
size/utilisation, it’s almost a case of set and forget. Staff impact is
negligible. We will occasionally see some delay in retrieving large files over
distant and small links but we have strategies for effectively managing this. All
Moonwalk traffic is encrypted. Whilst this is a fundamental requirement to
ensure data security and integrity, it also bypasses the WAN acceleration
infrastructure. The Moonwalk team will be working with us to see how we might
address this and achieve maximum possible throughput across our WAN
infrastructure."