Ramboll Transitions From On-Premises File Storage to Cloud

Nasuni Corp. announced Ramboll Group A/S, an architecture, engineering and consultancy firm, ranked 10th on the 2020 ENR list of International Design Firms – is the latest one to make the shift to Nasuni to overcome the limitations of traditional on-premises NAS.

In just a few months, Ramboll has grown its usage to 3PB, relying on Nasuni to store, protect and manage file data across 300 remote offices. The result has been simplified IT, lower costs, greater company agility and better collaboration for a user base of thousands.

Today’s AEC companies are engaged in global projects; employees need to be able to collaborate on massive files in remote locations. Ramboll partners with clients to create the infrastructure behind sustainable societies, routinely drawing upon the expertise of engineers and architects from many countries. As the firm built upon this model, slow recovery, infrastructure maintenance, insufficient scalability, application latency and data issues arose, making the shortfalls of traditional, on-premises NAS and file servers all too apparent. Nasuni enables AEC organizations to shed legacy storage infrastructure and adopt a cloud-first approach, as well as to consolidate NAS, backup, file sync, remote access and DR ‘silos’ with a single, unified global file solution.

Morten Madsen, IT project manager, Ramboll, recalled: “We were pleasantly surprised by Nasuni’s ease-of-use and how the platform delivered the same file server experience as NetApp, Inc., but with a much smaller local disk footprint.“

As Ramboll’s IT people began researching solutions, they discovered Nasuni and the multiple capabilities of its cloud service. Foremost, the later company consolidates all file storage silos in cloud object storage, while caching copies of frequently accessed files via lightweight Nasuni Edge Appliances wherever Ramboll needed high-performance access. The deployment began with 200TB backed by Microsoft Azure Blob storage and supported by Edge Appliances in different branches. When the pandemic hit, Ramboll’s storage needs quickly grew as all workers were remote, and now that they had unlimited capacity on-demand, deployment was increased to three petabytes.

“Nasuni makes a lot of sense because it gives us unlimited object-based file storage in the cloud and the flexibility of deploying a new appliance within two hours in order to make data available somewhere else,” added Madsen. “As a long-time NetApp customer, we evaluated their cloud offering, but Nasuni’s cloud native architecture was superior in terms of cost and performance.“

Unstructured data has been doubling every 2 to 3 years, fueling Nasuni’s growth. The company’s service provides unlimited storage, fast global access, centralized management and built-in data protection. Backup is automatic and can be conducted every 5 minutes without impact on the production environment, and recovery is near instantaneous. The firm routinely delivers all this at about half the total cost of legacy, on-premises NAS.

“As enterprises hurry to move away from on-premises infrastructure and consolidate in the cloud, the limitations of traditional NAS and backup are becoming more apparent. Top AEC firms like Ramboll require a degree of resilience, collaboration, performance and agility that traditional infrastructure cannot provide,” said Andres Rodriguez, founder and CTO, Nasuni. “Coupled with cloud object storage like Azure Blob, Nasuni makes it easy for organizations to store, protect, synchronize and access file data from anywhere in the world.“

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