Leading global architecture firm, Perkins+Will, deploys Nasuni

As a global architecture firm with more than 100 TB of critical data, 80 percent of which is in the form of building information modeling (BIM) files up to 300 MB in size, traditional storage and data protection was no longer meeting the needs of the business by mid-2013. More than a quarter of the firm’s projects involved multiple offices, and architects were spending an inordinate amount of time waiting for models to open or sync to the central office. The complexity of design and workflow applications such as Revit, Navisworks and Newforma places a premium on performance, and their traditional storage infrastructure was not delivering. Additionally, managing backup at remote locations was an extremely expensive and labor intensive effort. IT had to manage numerous storage systems in each location. Snapshots and file synchronization accounted for a huge proportion of MPLS/WAN traffic and were eating up a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

Finally, the rate of data growth was accelerating so quickly, that traditional three-year storage solutions were no longer sustainable.

“Our budget was spent not just on internal storage, where demands were growing exponentially, but also on backup of that storage plus offsite backup. It was a tremendous drain on our financial and IT resources, and truly a no-win situation,” said Murali Selvaraj, CIO at Perkins+Will.

Perkins+Will was projecting to spend millions over the next three years to upgrade and expand its centralized backup system alone when it learned that, for far less than it planned to spend on backup, it could deploy Nasuni. The company could save more than 50 percent over three years on backup alone and not only meet their data protection needs, but also provide high-performance storage service to all locations, access from anywhere, simple and centralized management for the global storage infrastructure, and unlimited capacity.

“We’ve deployed Nasuni at 25 locations,” Selvaraj continued, “and when we deployed at one of our larger offices, with senior executives on-site, no one knew there had been a change. That’s the perfect scenario – better storage, high performance and no change to end-users.”

“Perkins+Will faces the same storage challenges that many large architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms are facing,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. “Traditional storage technologies cannot meet the modern need to synchronize files between and provide data protection for all of an enterprise’s locations around the world. And AEC is not alone. As the marketplace has become increasingly global, so have storage needs, and in our tightly interconnected world, the ability to synchronize data for collaborative work separates the leaders from the rest of the pack. With Nasuni, global enterprises don’t’ have to settle for data protection alone. For less money than they currently pay for global backup, they can provide their organizations with so much more.”