Sundt Construction Makes Compellent the Cornerstone of its Storage Future
As one of the nation's largest construction companies, with more than $720 million in annual revenue, Sundt supervises building projects for clients ranging from various branches of the federal government to schools, universities and private developers. With the need to manage data for more than 100 job sites around the country and nine geographic locations, Sundt realized it was time to adopt a centralized storage solution that could provide affordable local and remote recovery, increase storage utilization and automate retention practices.
In the construction business since 1890, Sundt retains project documentation for all its projects including large CAD and architectural renderings for jobs like relocating the London Bridge to Lake Havasu, Arizona. "Our storage and recovery needs expand with every new project," said Chris Lake, Vice President and Director of Information Technology for Sundt. "Managing storage silos at remote locations was costly and inefficient, with utilization hovering around 15 percent. But protecting and recovering that data was even more of a challenge."
Lake set out to centralize Sundt's critical information on a storage area network (SAN) but after evaluating several big name storage vendors, he wasn't satisfied they could deliver the right functionality for the right price. A fellow IT manager mentioned Compellent as an option and once Lake saw a demo showing how easy Compellent is to manage he was hooked.
Compellent's Storage Center SAN was easily integrated into Sundt's heterogeneous OS environment. Today, Sundt relies on Compellent for continuous data protection, reliable business continuity and automated tiered storage. Sundt's SAN has increased storage utilization by 70 percent, giving the company a bigger return on its storage investment than its previous storage platform.
Compellent's Thin Replication Cuts Bandwidth and Management Time
Ensuring reliable, verifiable data recovery without breaking the bank was a top priority when Sundt began looking for a new storage solution. "Continuous data availability is an absolute requirement to ensure our operation stays on track," said Lake. "We knew we needed to replicate, but wanted to avoid expensive Fibre Channel to IP converters, and complicated solutions that require a lot of bandwidth."
Sundt has duplicate Compellent SAN configurations in its primary and secondary data centers, using Compellent's native IP-connectivity to replicate over low-cost network lines from Tucson to Phoenix. In the event of a disaster or hardware failure, Sundt can fail-over to a remote location or recover from remote servers with little downtime. According to Lake, Compellent's Thin Replication gave Sundt the ability to instantly recover to any point in time from either location, ensuring business continuity. "The Compellent replication solution reduced our anticipated bandwidth and management time requirements by 50 percent," continued Lake.
Continuous Snapshots Ensure Reliable iFolder Recovery In No Time
Sundt's remote users run Novell iFolder on their laptops to access, organize and manage their project files while on location at construction job sites. Block-level changes to users iFolder files are synchronized to the Compellent SAN every 60 seconds, and Compellent's Data Instant Replay software takes snapshots (Replays) of the synchronized folders throughout the day. These Replays ensure data recovery in less than 15 minutes without any impact on Sundt's production environment.
"Before implementing Compellent, we had to rely on daily tape backups to recover files, and each recovery could take between 4-12 hours," explained Lake. "Now we have point-in-time views throughout the day and recovery takes between 5-15 minutes, saving us over 400 man-hours a year in restores alone."
Automated Tiered Storage Enables Cost-Effective Online Retention
Archiving information to meet construction regulatory requirements can be costly if all the data is stored on the same expensive high-performance disks, regardless of how often the data is accessed. Sundt must retain large CAD drawings, architecture files, estimates and general documentation up to 10 years after a job is completed. In many cases, Sundt has to archive files for a total of 12-15 years from start to finish.
Sundt uses CommVault's Data Archiver as an archiving platform and Compellent's Data Progression to automatically migrate infrequently accessed files to a lower-cost tier of storage. Additionally, now that Sundt's retention is electronic, claims administrators can more easily locate and access the necessary files as needed.
"With Compellent's Data Progression, our files are always online and available. Our ‘hot' data remains on high-speed disks and ‘cold' data is automatically transferred to lower cost SATA drives," said Lake. "In addition to lowering our overall storage costs and support overhead, the savings in tape costs is tremendous."