Leading architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms such as AECOM, McKim & Creed and Coffman Engineers increasingly depend on Nasuni for cloud file storage and worldwide access, driving more than 50% year-over-year growth in AEC data under management
Nasuni Corporation, a leading provider of cloud file storage, detailed its momentum within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. With the Nasuni cloud file storage platform, AEC organizations can shift from silos of on-premises network attached storage (NAS) to the cloud delivering fast global access, along with unlimited storage capacity, centralized management from any location and built-in data protection — all at about half the total cost.
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Today’s AEC firms are on the cutting edge of data management and data is their core intellectual property. They manage globally dispersed projects, and employees must be able to collaborate across geographies on the rapidly growing file data on which their businesses depend. At the same time, the industry is facing serious challenges. Margins are slim at just 5.5% of sales, and costs in nonresidential construction have risen to the highest levels in the history of the Turner Building Cost Index.
AEC firms are increasingly relying on Nasuni backed by AWS, Azure or Google object storage because it increases their agility and efficiency while cutting the total cost of file storage in half over traditional on-premises solutions. The hybrid cloud combination of an object storage backend with edge performance for local performance is ideal for the needs of AEC firms. AEC customers maintain an average of 21 Nasuni edge caching appliances across 10 locations, with larger organizations having more than 470 edge appliances across nearly 50 sites. As a result, the amount of AEC data stored and protected with Nasuni has grown by more than 50% year-over-year.
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“Data protection was equally cumbersome. Local employees at each office were running tape backups every night. But the volume of business files was growing so quickly that backups were spilling over into the next day. We’d have data being written to the servers while backups were still going on,” says Rick Brock, network administrator at Hull & Associates, a project development and engineering consulting firm specializing in environment, energy and infrastructure markets. Hull & Associates is an ENR Top 200 Environmental Firm. With Nasuni’s continuous file versioning, file backup is now built-in with no extra effort or cost.
Effortless collaboration on large files and automatic data protection
Just as important to AEC is the ability to share and collaborate with excellent performance on the many enormous files that are central to their business, regardless of where employees are working. These files include computer aided design (CAD), 3-D plans, site photos and videos. These performance requirements are where most cloud storage options fall down.
Charles Douglass, director of IT at McKim & Creed, said, “Nasuni has helped us transition to working remote by allowing easy access to the data consolidated from all 22 of our offices. We’re accessing the data in a variety of methods, including directly from workstations, using remote controls tools and VDI depending on the specific application. No matter which tool we use for the job, Nasuni gives us a common backplane for easy data storage and retrieval.”
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Because AEC file data is doubling every two to three years and is typically stored across many different silos, protecting this data is extremely expensive and complex. With Nasuni, data protection takes place continuously, which allows for significantly reduced recovery time and recovery point objectives.
“Backup and storage are so much easier now. I don’t have to think a lot about it, which is great,” said Greg Nicols, chief technology officer at TBG Partners, a large landscape architecture design firm. “We plugged in these Nasuni edge appliances and they back up literally everything, constantly and instantly, and that is such a wonderful thing coming from tape backups and old school restores.”
Other large AEC companies that depend on Nasuni include:
- AECOM
- API Group
- Coffman Engineers
- Jerde Partnership
- Laing O’Rourke
- Leo A Daly
- McKim & Creed
- Osborn Engineering
- Ramboll
“Nasuni is seeing extensive growth and success in the AEC industry because our solution solves file data and collaboration challenges faced by most companies in the industry,” said Russ Kennedy, chief product officer at Nasuni. “With a cloud-based approach, our customers can effortlessly synchronize files across continents and cloud regions no matter how many locations they have, maintain high levels of productivity, consolidate complex data silos and sleep well at night knowing all their data is automatically protected. Our architecture allows us to deliver all this functionality at a fraction of the cost of legacy hardware-based systems and other cloud-based solutions.”
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