The challenge
- Rapid data growth
- The need for collaboration across the organisation
- Aging, slow storage
BDP is a major, integrated architecture, engineering, and design company headquartered in Manchester. Key for BDP was a focus on putting people at the centre of all thinking, and the ability for staff to work creatively and collaboratively across disciplines.
While the BDP IT team faced with several challenges, top of the list was managing an exponential rate of data growth, and facilitating collaboration.
“Autodesk, our chosen design software, becomes more capable and comprehensive every year, and with features such as 3D modelling, laser mapping, and drone imaging, file sizes are constantly growing. Additionally, as the team grows there are even more files to manage. It was difficult to predict just how much storage we needed without under or over-provisioning.
“At the same time, our architects at different regional and international offices needed to be able to quickly access and work together on common project files and apps. These needed to be available globally, 24/7, which was putting a big strain on our core storage infrastructure.”
Steve Peary, IT and Ops Manager at BDP
The storage infrastructure at BDP was nearing capacity and coming to the end of its life, and slow performance was affecting productivity with some large files taking 25 minutes to open.
The team looked at potential solutions including using the Public Cloud. After careful evaluation however, and for reasons of long-term cost, compliance, and potential vendor lock-in, it was decided that the Public Cloud was not an option for BDP’s core design apps at this point in time.
Our solution
- A high-performance, growth-enabling platform
- A private cloud infrastructure that worked with BDP’s data centre
- Protecting critical workloads
- Synapse360 design, deployment, and support
Steve turned to Synapse360 to design a new platform that would meet every requirement.
“We looked at a number of other suppliers before commissioning Synapse360, but their expertise and insight and our previous and positive experience of working with them more than tipped the balance.”
Steve Peary, IT and Ops Manager at BDP
Our experts proposed a private cloud infrastructure that would integrate with BDP’s existing Cisco UCS compute environment. Given the requirement for constant availability, a smooth migration to the new platform was key.
The Synapse360 solution featured enterprise-grade Dell EMC technology, giving BDP the option to easily store non-core data in the Public Cloud as and when required.
All Flash versions of both Dell EMC’s Unity and Isilon were deployed along with a Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance. The Unity SANs provided lightning-fast block storage for BDP’s virtual environment, Isilon a fast object storage for file, while ECS worked for colder, tiered data. To make sure data was protected in this new environment, a high-performance Data Domain backup appliance was also created.
“We recognised that as well as performance increases, BDP wanted to future proof their environment and have the option of increasing capacity without it being a ’forklift’ upgrade.
“The new solution fully integrated with the UCS environment, was highly scalable and with All Flash, was high performing.”
Phil Taylor, Synapse360 account manager
The result
- Greatly improved performance, continuity, and user experience
- Easy scalability and data tiering to the cloud
- No more firefighting
- Reduced operating costs due to the efficiency of de-duplicated software
The new platform delivered a much-improved user experience with large files opening within 5 minutes. 10g connectivity into the storage nodes ensured that everybody enjoyed high-speed computing.
“The Synapse360 team was highly professional. They conducted thorough testing and we were kept informed throughout. The engineers went out of their way to ensure any problems were resolved quickly and the Synapse360 team met our tight deadline for the deployment.
“With the new solution in place we are no longer firefighting, trying to manage the storage environment to meet user requirements, or dealing with support queries. We can focus on the projects the business needs to remain competitive.”
Steve Peary, IT and Ops Manager at BDP
The Synapse360 solution featured software which reduced the amount of physical storage space required. It achieved over a 30% reduction, which helped take the strain off the cooling system and reduced long term storage and power costs. It also gave BDP the headroom they needed to accommodate peaks in storage management.
Now that the new platform is in place, Steve, Phil and the BDP team can focus on new projects such as a VDI rollout and augmented reality apps that enable clients to walk through building designs as if they were there in person.
“We chose Synapse360 because they took the time to understand our business and they have proved to be highly responsive – no problem is too small. Above all, their solutions work, and they’ve met all the deadlines we’ve placed upon them.”
Phil Taylor, Synapse360 account manager
