In a bid to retrieve information more quickly, multinational engineering company Parsons Brinckeroff has completely eliminated tape from its storage environment.
As part of a long-term digital storage upgrade, the company has made the move to disk and deployed a number of new servers to accommodate data growth and to meet compliance requirements.
The firm has 150 offices across 26 countries and operates in consulting, large-scale engineering and construction, maintenance, and planning.
Its nine Australian offices require two terabytes of storage for client and business data including Computer-aided Design (CAD) files, engineering documents, and structural drawings.
A spokesperson for the company said it previously stored current projects on tape-backup via replication software and manual archiving to DVD, while tape was stored remotely for long-term storage.
"[We] wanted employees to be able to retrieve information in an immediate manner and to be able to back-up and recover data more quickly," the spokesperson said.
The company deployed seven Dell and EMC arrays in each Australian site, and rolled-out Dell Poweredge servers in smaller locations.
Dell Centera content-addressed storage units were used for long-term storage while EMC RepliStor was deployed to replicate production data, not already on the Centera units, to its EMC CX500 SAN arrays.
"[We] evaluated the company's files and eliminated eight terabytes of data such as duplicate documents, e-mails, and other data not required [and] this freed-up a significant amount of storage," he said.
Existing back-up software has been used to replicate data folders, allowing the company to completely eliminate tape-based storage from its storage environment.
"We now have a more efficient [storage environment] and we can retrieve, back-up, recover, and archive more data, quicker than before and we are set to meet future compliance regulations," the spokesperson said.