Nasuni Enables AEC Organizations to Securely Store Files and Easily Share Them Among Offices

Walsh Group, a Multi-Billion Dollar General Contractor, Uses Nasuni to Share Office, CAD and Multi-Media Files Among Offices Securely with Performance on Par with Local Storage

NATICK, Mass. – July 24, 2012 – Nasuni^®, a provider of enterprise storage to large, distributed organizations, today described how its solution is ideally suited to solve the specific IT storage challenges that global architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organizations face today.

Like most large enterprises, AEC companies are facing the dual IT challenge of massive file data growth coupled with the need to share that data among users in many different offices. AEC also faces the particular challenge of having to store an ever-growing mountain of very large CAD and multimedia files, in addition to the spreadsheets, presentations and text document files with which everyone is familiar. What’s more, engineers and other highly skilled personnel expect to be able to access and alter these files from many different locations, including temporary offices set up at worksites.

IT departments within AEC organizations have attempted to meet these challenges for years, with only partial success at best. VPN connections give remote access to files, but performance is often lacking, and document locking problems are common. WAN optimization and replication schemes can provide acceptable performance and document synchronization, but these solutions are extremely expensive, complicated to manage and impossible to scale.

Nasuni provides a simple to manage, but extremely powerful, solution for enterprise storage:

• Full Read-Write Access to Files Across Offices: Nasuni delivers shared access to all files in every office, extending the reach of office-specific expertise and knowledge across the entire firm. Distributed teams can work together and increase productivity with local-like performance, even for very large multi-media files.
• Simpler Management of Remote Office Storage Infrastructure: No matter where users are located, when they add or change files on the Nasuni service, IT can centrally manage those files within minutes. Plus, setting up a new remote office is as easy as installing a new instance of the Nasuni virtual appliance or the hardware appliance. Within minutes, the new office has complete access to the entire storage volume, no matter how many terabytes in size it may be.
• Unlimited and On-Demand Storage Scalability: With Nasuni, IT can provision multiple terabytes instantly, without needing to change the physical infrastructure, which gives organizations the ability to easily address and solve the explosive growth of file data.
• Perpetual Access and Complete Protection: Personnel at multiple offices can access files stored on Nasuni forever, and they are always secure. Files are encrypted at the client site and only the customer holds the encryption keys. Plus, all files are protected by Nasuni’s 100% availability guarantee, which is backed by a stringent SLA.

Walsh Group, a multi-billion dollar Chicago-based general contractor (the 17^th largest in the United States), is a good example of how AEC organizations are using Nasuni to provide full read-write access for the same storage volume to multiple, far-flung locations.

Ten years ago, each of Walsh’s nearly 20 North American offices were fairly independent IT silos. Today that siloed approach is no longer feasible because Walsh Group has people on the East Coast working on West Coast opportunities, and vice versa. In addition, the demand for storage has sharply accelerated over the last decade, so Walsh’s IT department has constantly had to allocate new storage to address the needs of new projects and the company’s rapid growth.

Walsh initially implemented a virtual private network (VPN) solution, which gave Walsh’s people access to files, but with substandard performance. The IT group also deployed Sharepoint, but the solution has not been widely adopted by end-users.

Last year, Walsh deployed Nasuni’s Storage Services to provide multi-site access to files and to ease the headache of managing its exponential file storage growth.

“With the increase in collaboration across geographies, we need to give our people access to the files they need with good performance,” said Mike Driscoll, infrastructure architect at Walsh Group. “Nasuni synchronizes all our file data, gives our users the feel and performance of local access and enables us to effectively address an ever-growing volume of files while making it possible to easily and securely share those files with our employees no matter where they are located. It is very much a set it and forget it experience, and I’ve not gotten much feedback from my people, which is a good thing. No phone calls complaining that they can’t get to the data they need means Nasuni is doing what it needs to do.”

“The AEC industry is facing IT storage challenges that traditional storage solutions cannot overcome,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. “With Nasuni, AEC organizations can provide primary storage to every office with instant access to as much storage capacity as needed.  It’s a first for the storage industry and finally enables AEC IT professionals to stop worrying constantly about storage capacity and management of complicated remote access schemes, so they can focus on more strategic initiatives.”

About Nasuni
Nasuni is an enterprise storage company that provides globally distributed organizations with a simple, unified storage solution for all of their remote and branch offices. By combining on-premise hardware with cloud storage, Nasuni delivers a secure, all-in-one data storage solution that provides local performance for users, simplified and centralized management for IT, and an easily scalable complete remote office storage solution for the enterprise.

Nasuni is privately held and based in Boston, MA. For more information, visit www.nasuni.com.

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