Aedas is the world’s fourth largest Architectural practice enjoying substantial growth. The company has expanded in recent years from 4 offices with 180 staff to 32 offices with 2,100 staff worldwide. The customer base is drawn from a wide arena including City Academic Colleges, Shopping Centres and Supermarkets including ASDA and Morrisons, Hospitals, Airports and other prestigious projects in the Middle East. The company has concentrated on gaining an international presence and has offices in the UK, wider Europe, Australia and the United States.
BACKGROUND
Aedas has enjoyed substantial growth both in terms of staff numbers and locations. The data stored was proving difficult to manage centrally with disparate systems and multiple servers across the organisation. In addition, individual locations were running out of disk space whilst others had spare capacity. The company also had no resilient business continuity or disaster recovery procedures and acknowledged that the loss of even one office could be a ‘business ending’ event. The company also recognised that simply increasing network bandwidth to address the issues was both cost prohibitive and restrictive.
APPROACH
SICL recommended a Riverbed Steelhead solution across the individual sites to provide LAN speed performance across the WAN. As a proof of concept exercise the Riverbed appliances were installed at just two sites. During this time, data from one site was completely removed locally and stored at the other site and, without announcement; the users at both sites ran unknowingly for two weeks from the single site without any impact on performance. This gave Aedas confidence in the solution to install the Riverbed units across the organisation.
RESULTS
The Riverbed Steelhead units were installed by SICL at 16 sites across the European division and the company was immediately able to implement their resilient programme for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. In addition, the company was able to realise immediate cost savings by reducing the bandwidth required and a planned server refresh was deemed unnecessary. The project as a whole had an impressive ROI of just 18 months with the added benefit of reducing work load at both local and central levels. In addition Aedas was able to considerably reduce its carbon footprint.
“SICL’s recommendation to install Riverbed technology has revolutionised the manner in which we handle our data. We have far more control for less effort allowing us to concentrate on other business projects. We now have resilient DR and Business Continuity procedures which are extremely important to the business. We are looking forward to working further with SICL on future projects.”
Neil Ewing – Aedas, Head of IT (Europe)
