Case Study

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (with regional offices serving Maryland, the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia and Ohio), PJ Dick has established a leading position in the construction industry, with vast experience in commercial, institutional and public sector projects. Consistently ranked among the nation’s Top 100 General Contractors and Construction Managers by Engineering News-Record, PJ Dick has managed over $3 billion in commercial, industrial, federal, and specialty projects since its inception in 1979.

The SituationThe IT department at PJ Dick now supports approximately 20 different company divisions spread across several states; over the years, the department’s storage architecture has evolved from one 200 MB internal hard drive in a single server to its current 16 TB IBM Storage Area Network (SAN) connected to 50 servers. That SAN was already being pushed to its capacity limits due to the company’s “no delete” policy (which dictates all files be permanently retained); exacerbating the problem was the growing use of multi-gigabyte Building Information Modeling (BIM) and 3D CAD files, as well as the multitude of project-related digital photos taken by the company’s engineers. According to Frank Broskey, Network Manager at PJ Dick, the firm now has over 8 million BIM files to store.

The Challenge Employing its high-performance SAN storage to house all of its files, regardless of their age or relevance, was not cost-effective for PJ Dick; equally problematic were the increasingly long backup windows required by this “SAN-only” storage strategy. The company explored other backup software options, but they didn’t resolve the lengthy backup issues; then it installed an EMC Avamar backup system, which proved effective in helping to shrink backup times. However, the system’s storage quickly filled, and adding capacity was cost-prohibitive.

As Broskey recalls, “We quickly filled up our Avamar unit, it has 4 TB of storage capacity so we couldn’t save more than about 20 days worth of file backups.” On the first weekend of every month, the company would write out tapes of every file backup and put them in a vault. Broskey wryly notes, “I can’t just go back and restore them if I really wanted one...I can probably do it, but it would cost a lot of money to go out and find the equipment to be able to load the tape, the software to be able to read it—it would be just a nightmare trying to get back on those.”

Construction firm lays foundation for expandable, affordable archive and backup with Imation InfiniVault™ Active Archive Storage Appliance

AT-A-GLANCE

Industry:Construction

Application:

Document Image Storage

Business Data Archiving

Legacy Software Retention

Software: EMC Avamar

Benefits Realized: Faster, more cost-effective backups while accommodating continued data growth; unlimited capacity for storage and data archive of digital information; quicker, more efficient file retrievals.

Imation Enterprises Corp., 1 Imation Way, Oakdale, MN 55128.3414 USA Ph: 651.704.4000 Fax: 651.537.4675 www.imation.com © Imation Corp. Imation, the Imation logo and InfiniVault are trademarks of Imation Corp and its affiliates. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. (03.05.12)

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With these difficulties in mind, PJ Dick soon concluded that an effective archiving strategy was the key to reducing storage demands on the SAN, cutting backup window times, ensuring long-term retention of all of its files, and lowering overall storage costs.

The SolutionAfter extensive research, Broskey and his team found the Imation InfiniVault Active Archive Storage Appliance line of data archive appliances met their needs on multiple levels: initial cost, ease of deployment and management, as well as seamless expansion and upgrading. As a result, PJ Dick installed an InfiniVault Model 30 at its main office. “We have eight of the 10 slots already assigned out to three different vaults,” explains Broskey. Fast data accessibility is a particular concern for Broskey: “I just don’t ever want to take a cartridge out. We don’t believe in a user having to wait for somebody to go back and load a cartridge in. That was a big selling point to us for the InfiniVault, I like that we can just continue to add on racks and never have to take a cartridge out.”

Two of the company’s vaults are used for live content; one for imaging files and the other for archiving files off the firm’s Windows servers. The third vault serves as a repository for outdated software, according to Broskey. “In the construction business, some of our jobs are so old that we might have a file from five years ago that we need to access—and often that means we’ll need software from way back then, so our third vault houses earlier versions of various applications.” This strategy not only frees up primary storage for more important live files, it also shrinks backup windows as well.

Indeed, significant improvements in both backup speed and accessibility have been delivered by the InfiniVault appliance. After deploying the Model 30, PJ Dick can now keep up to one year’s worth of backups on its Avamar system, far more than its previous limit of 20 days. Broskey enthuses, “It’s made our backups so much more manageable that we can easily go back a lot further. We rarely get people who need a certain file as of a certain date more than a year ago, but we get a lot of ‘Oops, I overwrote this file on this day, can you give it to me from the day before?’ And it’s real nice to be able to say ‘Yep, here you go.’ We can go back to the exact day of when they changed that file.”

Cost is always a key consideration with any storage solution, and here again PJ Dick has realized substantial gains from its InfiniVault investment. “I think our biggest benefit has been with our backup,” Broskey continues. “The cost per terabyte of an EMC Avamar solution is tremendous, so any time you can save space you’re going to save money. It’s a $100,000 Avamar system that we put in place, but without the InfiniVault Model 30 I think we’d have been closer to $200,000-$250,000. So the InfiniVault has really enabled us to stay within a manageable backup solution without blowing our backup budget way out.”

Would Broskey choose the same solution again? “I’d have no problem with that at all. The Imation InfiniVault met every goal that we set and gave us exactly what we wanted; you can’t really ask more than that from any solution.”

Questions? Contact us at:Phone: 651-704-7777Website: www.scalablestorage.com

“ Imation InfiniVault met every goal that we set and gave us exactly what we wanted; you can’t really ask more than that from any solution.

”—Frank Broskey

Network Manager, PJ Dick Incorporated