Arup
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Arup: Most effective use of IT in construction
Project: Storage consolidation
Business goal: To develop a system that would slash the amount of time and money it would take to recover the company's 32 exchange servers.
Project partner: Network Appliance
Award sponsor: The IT Construction Forum
Arup is a world-renowned engineering consultancy with global revenues exceeding £400 million. Its best-known works include Sydney Opera House, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and the Allianz Arena football stadium in Munich, with Beijing airport and the Olympic stadium among its future projects.
As the company has expanded - it currently has approximately 7,000 employees working in 160 countries - its demand for supporting IT systems has similarly blossomed. And while growing data volumes present problem enough, the global nature of the company meant that the windows for backing up data shrank.
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The challenges faced by Arup are illustrated by its Microsoft Exchange environment at its London headquarters. It had 32 systems to maintain, with 32 accompanying sets of licensing and maintenance contracts. It estimates that it that it has two server outages per year, both capable of taking down the system for 24 hours.
This demanding environment will be familiar to most multinationals, but it is Arup's smooth implementation of the solution to these problems which caught the judges' eyes. Arup wanted a single products and services supplier, and chose Network Appliance. The first challenge, to migrate a set of eight Exchange stores to the NetApp fabric-attached storage (FAS) system, was accomplished without outage, on time and 15% under budget.
The remainder of the London office's Exchange systems were standardised onto the NetApp IP SAN, which supports more than 2,200 users and over 3TB of data. There have been no outages since deployment and simulations show that within five minutes of one Exchange system being switched off, another can pick up its workload with no performance degradation. Complete Exchange recoveries now take 25 minutes, rather than 24 hours.
The cost benefits include considerable savings in capital, licensing, tape media and hardware. Business users have gained from easy access to the complete Arup knowledge pool project data. IT staff's management of the storage structure allows information management decisions to be taken by project teams.
A wider gain is the time freed up for more strategic IT projects. "We want our IT staff to have time to focus on building business solutions, not maintaining mail servers," says Arup's global operations manager Martin Cooper. "We can work smarter, not harder."
