hrs-case-study
Construction consulting firm saves time and money with simplified storage.
When engineering firm HRS started pioneering new IT solutions and developing more in-house tools and systems, it needed a storage solution that wouldn’t compromise performance or security. Seagate® Exos™ storage systems offered simple integration, excellent speed, higher productivity, and protection during a natural disaster.
The Exos X 2U12 RAID system and Exos E 2U12 petabyte-class JBOD provided the capacity needed to keep up with increasing data demands.
The Exos system achieves sequential read/write speeds above the theoretical value of 10Gbps with little tuning, ensuring efficiency.
Despite collecting more data than ever, the Exos system reduced storage management costs by 40%.
Eliminating an old NAS and six tower servers enabled HRS to consolidate, improving performance and making it easier to design the network.
HRS is a consulting engineering firm focused on the construction and safety of roads, bridges, and tunnels. With a mission of protecting lives and enriching local communities, HRS provides surveys, structural and accessory inspections, information processing, data analysis, and other information system proposals and deliveries. They needed to rethink its storage solution to innovate the latest safety technology.
HRS developed open-sourced software to lower costs and speed operations. It also offered clients access to an internal storage service with an on-premises solution.
Outsourcing was costly and created a high risk of vendor lock-in, so HRS developed small tools and systems in-house. However, as the systems increased along with data-collection trends, the system became disjointed, complicating storage management and user experience. Even activities such as adding storage were time-consuming and impacted company productivity.
HRS wanted to ensure its efficiency remained high despite increasing data demands. “We knew we’d never be able to improve efficiency with a system that makes people wait. That’s why I knew it was time to upgrade the storage system, along with our networking system,” said Takafumi Suzuki, company president.
Suzuki knew from experience that depending on a cloud for all of their data needs was risky. Severe natural disasters, such as earthquakes, cut off access to critical data that keep the organization operating. Teams could not address emergency needs when they needed it most during these disasters.
HRS landed on Seagate’s Exos X 2U12, a RAID storage system, and Exos E 2U12, a petabyte-class enclosure. Suzuki chose Exos products for several reasons: they have excellent speed, are cost-efficient, and are easy to integrate with their current systems. Their default tolerance level would also keep HRS systems resilient against earthquakes thanks to Seagate’s ADAPT feature with fast rebuild time.
“In the construction consulting industry, we have to be able to continue our work even in times of disaster. The fact that Seagate’s storage can somehow rebuild and continue working even in times of disaster was very attractive to me,” reflected Suzuki.
HRS’s storage solution enabled them to dispose of obsolete hardware and consolidate physical servers, improving performance and cost. More than that, though, was the psychological cost savings of simplifying storage architecture, making it easier to design the network and isolate any issues. This solution allowed HRS to:
Install two arrays of 216TB and two units at two locations.
Achieve sequential read/write speeds above the theoretical value of 10Gbps with little tuning.
Reduce the cost of managing storage by 40%.
Dispose of old NAS and eliminate six tower servers.
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