Capita P&I solves collaboration and storage needs

Capita Property and Infrastructure (P&I) the UK's leading provider of business process management and integrated professional support service solutions, has partnered with Talon and Microsoft to optimize its onsite file sharing and data storage needs.

Capita P&I needed to centralize its data for ease of access and collaboration for files, including typical Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, designer files and large project files, including Autodesk AutoCAD, Revit, Bentley Microstation, and other engineering applications. Bringing this data together enabled Capita P&I's distributed user workforce to access central files and collaborate on projects from the company's various branch offices. The move was also mandated by the UK government, which, beginning in 2016, requires that all parties involved in the execution of construction projects for the UK government must, at minimum, support a BIM Level 2 process. Talon's approach allowed Capita P&I to enable the processes for BIM 2.0 compliance, eventually helping to lower costs for the construction and management of buildings.

It was mandatory that Capita P&I adhere to BIM 2.0 compliance, permitting centralized data to be available to users, including architects and engineers, who need to leverage their desktop's processing power in close proximity to the data. Talon's RemoteFASTTM caches only what is required at the branch, while providing high performance and immediate access to all data in the organization, all while helping keep the storage footprint to a minimum.

"In some of our branch offices we needed to deploy and manage 6 or more different servers or storage devices in order to provide a ‘good enough' level of service," said Daren Stone, Change and Improvement manager for Capita P&I. "However managing all this local file storage, backups and application servers was a real pain point."

By using both Microsoft StorSimple and Talon RemoteFASTTM for Windows Server, Capita P&I has been able to design a highly scalable and cost effective hybrid cloud-based solution that optimizes the consumption and overall management of file-level and unstructured data throughout the distributed enterprise.

By combining both solutions, Capita P&I has been able to deliver a single set of managed data at the datacenter. Deploying a RemoteFASTTM virtual instance at the edge has also allowed for full consolidation of all Microsoft Services at the branch, including Active Directory, DNS/DHCP, DFS Namespace, and SCCM Software, on top of Microsoft Hyper-V, using a single physical server at Capita P&I's branch locations.

"As soon as we deployed the StorSimple/RemoteFAST enabled 'Office-in-a-box', all business users were able to pull their data back down from the datacenter file servers," said Stone. "It is quicker and in a disaster recovery situation, you get the business back up and running very, very quickly."