Storage Efficiency and Consolidation

Executive Summary

Overview
Arup Americas is part of Arup Group Limited, a global engineering and design firm. The company brings a distinctive multidisciplinary, independent, and creative approach to solving engineering problems. That decentralized business approach, however, resulted in many disparate storage systems, silos of data, and inefficient processes and operations. Starting in 2007, the company, led by Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Neil Clover, reinvented its information technology (IT) operations, creating a regionally distributed storage architecture based on NetApp hardware and software. The transformation resulted in dramatic improvements in the company’s management of production data, archive and retrieval processes, and disaster recovery.

Barriers
Arup Americas is a decentralized company with many semi-independent offices. One result of this corporate structure is that Arup had a variety of storage systems. Data was trapped in silos, backup was slow and inadequate, restores were tedious and manual, archiving of finished projects was incomplete, and the IT staff spent too much time on mundane tasks. These barriers were complicated by an annual data growth rate of 50 percent.

The Solution
In 2008,Arup Americas replaced its many disparate storage systems with NetApp storage. Regional data centers in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were established to handle data storage, data protection, and disaster recovery. Arup now uses key technologies such as NetApp storage hardware as well as NetApp Thin Provisioning, deduplication, and FlexClone. NetApp SnapMirror, SnapManager for SQL Server, and SnapManager for Exchange provide extra manageability for those respective applications.

Benefits
A Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by Alchemy Group found that the NetApp- based storage architecture produced tangible business value for Arup Americas. Actual and projected savings totaling $1,588,579 from May 2008 through December 2010 were found in the following six areas:

• Deduplication Storage Cost Avoidance: $880,000 in storage costs avoided from 2008 through 2010 because of NetApp deduplication
• Storage Provisioning Labor Savings: $229,877 in IT labor savings from 2008 through 2010 due to NetApp Thin Provisioning
• Backup Labor Savings: $241,371 in IT labor savings from 2008 through 2010 due to NetApp Snapshot technology
• Productivity Gains Through High Availability: $107,169 in IT and engineering staff labor savings from 2008 through 2010 by eliminating application outages from storage failures
• Tape Backup Labor and Media Savings: $72,693 in tape-related hardware, media, and labor savings from 2008 through 2010 with NetApp disk-to-disk backups
• File Restores Labor Productivity Gains: $57,469 in IT labor savings from 2008 through 2010 by making file restores faster and easier