Richard Hall, HNTB: EMC & VMware Selected for Private Cloud  Move

August 10, 2010

HNTB, a $1 billion planning, design, program management and construction management services firm, has implemented EMC and VMware solutions to streamline, protect and manage its rapidly growing information infrastructure and reduce IT expenditures and management costs as it moves towards the private cloud.

Richard Hall, Vice President and Director, Corporate Information Services, HNTB Corporation, said, "As engineering and design applications become more sophisticated with 3-D capabilities, our electronic file sizes are growing exponentially. In addition, our business is expanding, so we have more operational data. One of our biggest challenges is managing these growing data capacities while keeping our IT costs under control."

Based in Kansas City, HNTB implemented VMware vSphere 4 virtualization software to consolidate its IT infrastructure to 12 servers and 250 virtual machines on its path to the private cloud. With approximately 70 percent of its server infrastructure virtualized, HNTB estimates this approach would require an additional 238 servers and more storage had it not been virtualized. EMC has by far the most integrated solution support for VMware environments and continues to underscore its position as the number one choice in storage for VMware environments with customers choosing EMC two times as often as any other vendor.

"Virtualization has definitely slowed server sprawl and reduced costs associated with buying new servers and paying for their administration and energy use," said Hall. "We're also much more responsive to supporting new projects. We can deploy a virtual machine in a day, or even 30 minutes, when it can take weeks to provision a new physical server."

To store information from its physical and virtual infrastructures, as well as its most critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, HNTB chose market-leading EMC CLARiiON and EMC Celerra midrange storage systems. To help maximize the efficiency of its information infrastructure, HNTB also has implemented EMC SourceOne solution to archive older Exchange e-mails from CLARiiON to long-term EMC Centera storage.

"Many of our employees require large and growing storage capacities to create detailed engineering drawings and project plans," explained Hall. "With EMC, we've been able to scale very responsibly and cost efficiently. With a consolidated, virtualized environment, we're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenditures for servers, tapes and storage. In addition, as our storage infrastructure has grown from nearly a terabyte to 400 terabytes over 15 years, we haven't needed to increase our storage administration staff."

At its primary datacenter, HNTB phased out tape backup in favor of next-generation backup and recovery with EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage systems to protect its most critical application data across its physical and virtualized server environments. In addition, HNTB's 80 remote offices have replaced tape operations with EMC RepliStor software for replication of local files to the Celerra storage system, which is also replicated to a remote site for disaster recovery. HNTB also deployed Data Domain to automate its disaster recovery processes, significantly reducing both recovery-time objectives (RTOs) and recovery-point objectives (RPOs) while decreasing operational costs.

Hall explained, "With EMC Data Domain, we've been able to replicate and protect our data offsite in almost real time—instead of once a week—which has greatly reduced our RPO. Depending on the type of data, our dedupe ratios for full backups range between 10 and 45 to 1, which has decreased our backup storage capacities by 87 percent along with our power, cooling and floor space requirements. There's also been a dramatic reduction in the WAN bandwidth needed for replication to the disaster recovery site. As we continue to virtualize, Data Domain simplifies our approach to backing up our physical servers and virtual machines."