Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Improved Branch Office Backup Saves Engineering Firm U.S.$739,000 Annually
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Engineering and architecture
Customer Profile
ARCADIS is a global engineering and construction consulting firm with 10,000 employees and revenues of U.S.$1 billion. The U.S. division has 76 offices, 66 of which have no resident IT staff.
Business Situation
ARCADIS wanted to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of backing up branch office data. Tape backups were costly in terms of equipment, backup software, staff time, and backup failures.
Solution
ARCADIS upgraded to Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2 to take advantage of automated file-replication and storage-management efficiencies.
Benefits
n Annual backup-related savings of U.S.$222,383
n Productivity savings of $240,000
n Tape-related savings of $276,672
n Storage reduction of 30 percent
n Increased revenue through enhanced customer focus / “We estimate that Windows Server 2003 R2 will eliminate the productivity losses caused by server downtime, which for us runs about eight servers a year. This time is worth an estimated $240,000.”
Craig Fletcher, IT Operations Manager, ARCADIS
ARCADIS is a leading engineering and construction company that offers a wide range of services to public and private sector clients all over the world. ARCADIS was looking for a more reliable and less expensive way to back up critical business data at its 118 United States branch offices, where non-IT professionals were required daily to change, transport, and track down storage tapes. The company took advantage of its Microsoft® Software Assurance licensing agreement to upgrade file and print server computers at its branch offices to Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 R2, the latest release of the operating system, which features much-improved replication and storage management. The no-charge upgrade is expected to save ARCADIS approximately U.S.$739,000 annually in staff time, tape-related costs, improved server and business uptime, and more efficient data storage.
Situation
ARCADIS is an international engineering consulting firm providing infrastructure, environmental, and construction services to governments and businesses all over the world. The parent firm, ARCADIS NV, is headquartered in The Netherlands, with U.S. operations based in Denver, Colorado. ARCADIS offers a wide range of services as diverse as environmental remediation and football stadium design.
In the United States, ARCADIS employees are spread across 76 branch offices ranging in size from 2 to 200 employees. Each branch office has at least one file and print server computer, but only the 10 largest offices have IT people on staff to care for branch technology. As committed users of Microsoft® products, the ARCADIS IT staff maintains branch computer systems remotely, using features such as Remote Assistance in the Windows® XP Professional operating system and management technologies in the Windows Server™ 2003 operating system such as Active Directory® directory service and Group Policy Management Console.
However, one routine yet critically important IT task remained dependent on branch office personnel: monitoring and performing office data backups and restorations each day. Like many companies, ARCADIS backed up user files—which in its case consist of large engineering drawings, project documents, schedules, quotes, spreadsheets, and so forth—onto magnetic tapes and stored those tapes off-site for security. At the 66 offices with no IT staff, secretaries or even engineers were in charge of data backup: inserting tapes at the end of each business day, changing tapes, and transporting tapes to off-site locations. When an employee lost a file and needed the backup copy, the same busy staff members had to stop what they were doing, hunt up the appropriate backup tape, and restore the file.
“Backup operations were not a huge time waster for any one employee, taking about 20 minutes a day, but cumulatively, across the company, they were costing us a lot of money, especially when they didn’t get done,” says Ed Montero, Vice President of IT for ARCADIS. “We were relying on non-IT people to perform IT functions at 80 percent of our offices, and backup was just not a priority to them. It was an interruption to their normal jobs and was not happening in a reliable fashion.”
Sometimes employees would leave the company and forget to transfer their backup responsibilities to another employee, leaving that office with no backup files for weeks or months. Off-site tapes were not always stored in secure locations or even locations known by the corporate IT staff.
“If a branch file server failed and there was no current backup data for it, we could lose a great many files and a lot of worker productivity,” Montero says. “We estimate the average cost of server downtime to be U.S.$2,500 per hour.” Unfortunately, branch server computers fail an average of a half-dozen times a year, costing ARCADIS what it estimates to be at least $200,000 in lost branch office productivity—plus the IT staff time involved in recovering failed servers. It took two IT staff members 24 hours or more to either replace a failed branch office server or bring a “down” server back “up,” which is time they could have been spending implementing new IT solutions that could help the company be more efficient and competitive.
Even routine backup chores ate up valuable IT staff time. Craig Fletcher, IT Operations Manager for ARCADIS, estimates that monitoring daily backup operations stole about an hour a day from two of its 14 Denver-based IT staff. Then there were the hard costs of tapes, tape drives, tape storage, and backup software across 76 offices—a whopping $276,672 a year.
With the company growing rapidly through mergers and acquisitions and new branch offices opening monthly, backup costs were mounting—along with the cost of lost productivity when local servers experienced problems. ARCADIS had to find a better way.
Solution
Montero and Fletcher looked at several file-replication products on the market—Legato RepliStor, Veritas Replicator Exec, and NSI Software Double-Take—which would provide block-level replication of branch office files to the Denver office. The problems with these products, according to ARCADIS, were their cost, bandwidth requirements, and lack of an intuitive interface. “We weren’t keen on buying and maintaining third-party software licensing and support agreements across 76 offices,” Fletcher says.
In mid-2005, Microsoft introduced Windows Server 2003 R2, the second release of the Windows Server 2003 operating system, which builds on the security benefits provided by Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 while providing a suite of new features that improve management of branch office server computers. Specifically, Windows Server 2003 R2 includes a completely rewritten replication engine for the Distributed File System (DFS). DFS Replication (DFS-R) provides a robust file-replication service that is significantly more scalable and efficient in synchronizing file servers than its predecessor, File Replication Services. DFS-R uses a new technology called Remote Differential Compression to transmit only changed portions of files across the network, preserving expensive network bandwidth. Also, if a network connection or server fails during a transmission, Windows Server 2003 R2 intelligently notes the point of failure and resumes the replication at that point rather than starting over. Windows Server 2003 is part of Windows Server System™ integrated server software.
Through its Microsoft Software Assurance licensing agreement, ARCADIS was able to upgrade its Windows Server 2003–based file and print server computers to this recent release at no additional charge. Microsoft Premier Support invited ARCADIS to join the Technology Adoption Program for Windows Server 2003 R2, and ARCADIS promptly upgraded 7 of its 100 branch office file and print servers to the new operating system as a pilot.
“With the Microsoft Software Assurance agreement, we get the newest version of Microsoft software as soon as it comes out,” Montero says. “We’re growing rapidly, so this is very valuable to us—our newest offices get the latest Microsoft software at no charge.”
Fletcher adds that, although the price of Windows Server 2003 R2 was reasonable, the product was also technically superior to the third-party replication products ARCADIS evaluated. “Windows Server 2003 R2 was easier to use than the other products, with a more intuitive interface,” he says. “We also tested the bandwidth usage of all the products and found Windows Server 2003 R2 to be more efficient, especially with the File Similarity algorithm that Microsoft developed.”
ARCADIS is in the process of rolling out Windows Server 2003 R2 (a combination of Standard and Enterprise Editions) to all 100 branch office file and print server computers and eliminating tape backup equipment and procedures. The new backup procedure works like this: ARCADIS uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service feature of Windows Server 2003 R2 to take a point-in-time snapshot of branch office data twice a day. The DFS-R feature in the operating system then detects whether any files have changed, and the Remote Differential Compression feature sends only the changed portions to a storage area network (SAN) in Denver, imposing a very light load on the company’s T1 line. Branch office files are thus automatically backed up during the workday, rather than only once at day’s end, and without any manual intervention at either branch or Denver offices.
If a user loses a file, he or she can use the Volume Shadow Copy Service to restore it. If the entire branch office server computer fails, ARCADIS can automatically redirect users to a Denver server that can access the backup data, eliminating the cost of server downtime and lost worker productivity.
Benefits
By taking advantage of its Microsoft Software Assurance agreement and upgrading its 100 branch office file and print server computers to Windows Server 2003 R2, ARCADIS is saving approximately $739,000 a year in combined staff time, equipment costs, and software licensing.
Annual Backup-Related Staff Savings of $222,383
The use of Windows Server 2003 R2 has allowed ARCADIS to eliminate tape-based backup procedures at its 76 branch offices, reducing the staff time that used to be required in both branch and central offices to administer and monitor backup operations. “Our branch office staff no longer has to deal with branch office backups,” Fletcher says. “Online replication makes backups automatic. Branch staffs no longer need to load, change, or transport tapes off-site. And our IT staff no longer has to monitor backup operations. Companywide backup-related productivity savings amount to an estimated $222,383 per year—approximately $219,153 in branch office staff time and $3,230 in IT staff time.”
Productivity Savings of $240,000 from Uninterrupted Data Access
Disaster recovery happens much faster now because the company has an instantly accessible, online replica of all backup data. Before, the only way to recover a lost or corrupted file was to track down the appropriate backup tape; if that tape could not be found or the file was never backed up, the user (and ARCADIS) was out of luck. Worse, if a branch office server computer failed, two Denver IT staff members had to drop everything and spend 24 hours recovering the server—with most of that time spent tracking down backup data and reconstructing files.
With Windows Server 2003 R2, ARCADIS says that it requires 80 percent less effort to install a new server computer when one has failed. “Before, we had to hope we had good backups and find tapes, catalog them, and restore from them,” Fletcher says. “Now it takes just a few hours to configure a new server, load data on it, and ship it to a branch. But more importantly, branch office workers have uninterrupted data access during this time. Replicated data is immediately available; we simply point users to a new server—in many cases they’re not even aware that their local server has gone down. We estimate that Windows Server 2003 R2 will eliminate the productivity losses caused by server downtime, which for us runs about eight servers a year. This time is worth an estimated $240,000.”
Tape-Related Savings of $276,672
ARCADIS is also pocketing hard savings by eliminating tapes, tape drives, tape storage, and backup software costs at branch offices. Fletcher estimates these companywide annual savings to be:
n Tapes—$114,000.
n Tape drives—$141,332 (based on a three-year life cycle, 76 offices, and an estimated 10 additional offices per year).
n Tape storage and shipment costs to off-site locations—$18,240.
n Third-party backup software licenses—$3,100.
These hard savings total $276,672.
Storage Reduction of 30 Percent
ARCADIS is taking advantage of the storage-management features in Windows Server 2003 R2 to keep storage costs down. When the company switched to replication-based security, it also installed a storage area network in its Denver headquarters. The IT staff uses File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) in Windows Server 2003 R2 to monitor disk space usage and identify unauthorized files on company disks. FSRM is a suite of tools that helps system administrators understand how storage is being used and manage the use of storage by generating storage reports, applying quotas to volumes and folders, and screening files on the server. Using FSRM helps ARCADIS better plan and optimize storage by creating quotas, creating file screens, and scheduling storage reports.
“We’re using 30 percent less disk space by using File Server Resource Manager to identify and eliminate invalid data on the network,” Fletcher says. “It gives us a better overview of the kinds of files on our SAN—identifies duplicate files, files that haven’t been used in awhile, and non-business files. A 30 percent reduction in storage reduces our spending on server and disk upgrades and improves file server performance. Also, with Remote Differential Compression, we replicate less data, so we’re saving money on bandwidth.”
Increased Revenue Through Enhanced Customer Focus
By relieving professional and administrative branch office staff of routine backup chores, ARCADIS has freed more time for these valuable resources to do the jobs that they were hired to do. “Our branch staffs’ billable hours are not interrupted by IT chores,” Montero says. “This allows them to spend more time doing things that make money for ARCADIS—serving customers and working on solutions.”