Advances in digital design coupled with introduction of the digital camera have dramatically elevated the storage requirements of the architecture industry. The impact of the digital revolution on Australia-based architecture firm HBO+EMTB is no different, with the firm experiencing an explosion of data in the form of hundreds of thousands of digital photographs, brochures and design plans.

HBO+EMTB is a design house with studios in 21 cities across Asia Pacific. They offer diverse expertise in architecture, interior design, workplace solutions, urban design, landscape design, heritage and planning.  Headquartered in Sydney, the firm has five offices throughout Australia and a network of offices in every major centre of the Asia Pacific, including Auckland, Wellington, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as a strong international presence. HBO+EMTBs 300+ specialists deliver projects that shape the worlds most dynamic cities.

To help manage the firms deluge of digital data, Kia Hunter joined HBO+EMTB as IT Manager in early 2001. In her years with the company, Hunter has seen a dramatic increase in HBO+EMTBs storage requirements fuelled by high resolution photographs of everything from lounge rooms to 3D building models, which has resulted in HBO+EMTB boasting a massive image library.

For the IT department of six people, managing this data and accommodating for future growth is a constant challenge. 

The rate we consume storage is astounding, explained Hunter. We used to be able to archive a design project on one to two CDs, but now were lucky to get a project onto one or two DVDs because projects have increased in size dramatically over the years.

Compounding this data storage challenge is HBO+EMTBs aggressive growth strategy that has expanded the companys IT footprint. Forged from two companies founded in 1912 and 1945, the amalgamated practice of HBO+EMTB was established in Sydney in 1994 and has rapidly expanded to a permanent presence in ten countries around the world. 

One of the primary responsibilities of the IT team is to provide HBO+EMTB with the storage backbone to support the firms rapid growth and escalating storage requirements. With more and more employees joining the company and storing larger and larger files to the network, managing HBO+EMTBs digital data is a never-ending challenge. 

Previously, HBO+EMTB supported its storage growth by leveraging a server-attached storage infrastructure that consisted of distributed servers in each office location. In Australia alone, HBO+EMTB had five separate servers that do not talk to each other. This decentralized infrastructure made data management difficult because all servers are managed remotely by HBO+EMTBs Sydney-based IT team.  

There is an expectation that we can expand and expand to accommodate all of the data, but server-attached storage doesnt work that way, explained Hunter. We have servers all over the place. We have to manage each of those servers, the storage on each server and the backup on each server. It becomes a challenge when we dont have IT staff in each location.

Furthermore, this decentralized infrastructure makes collaboration between offices difficult. Should an employee in Sydney need to view a project plan stored to the Melbourne server, Hunter must replicate the file. This process is time consuming and discourages seamless inter-office collaboration.

Maintenance is also a challenge, with HBO+EMTB IT staff physically travelling to outer office locations when an IT upgrade is necessary. Between upgrades, HBO+EMTB leverages non-IT employees or an external contractor to maintain the servers and manage tape changes. Tape changes occur frequently with new disks filling up within a week or two.

With scalability, collaboration and maintenance a constant concern, Hunter recognized that an IT change was necessary. 

Deciding that server-based storage did not meet their needs, HBO+EMTB put out a tender for a new storage solution. After looking at solutions from three vendors, HBO+EMTB decided that the system that would best suit their growing need for capacity and inter-office collaboration would be a modular storage solution from Hitachi Data Systems, the Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 200.

We chose the Hitachi AMS 200 because of its capacity and upgradeability. A few years down the line when we want to upgrade, we know that our AMS 200 will be easily upgradeable to, and compatible with, Hitachis latest storage offering, says Hunter. 

Hunter selected a storage area network (SAN) infrastructure to centralize HBO+EMTBs disparate IT operations to its Sydney headquarters. The roll-out of the solution was undertaken in a phased approach. The first phase involved transferring all data from the disparate servers at headquarters to the SAN, eliminating the need for internal storage within the servers. The second phase of the implementation was to continue the centralization process by moving all outer office servers and archived data to the SAN. During 2008, HBO+EMTB eliminated all remote servers.

So far, Hunter and her team have relocated over 1.2TBs of active data and over 1TB of archived data onto the SAN, but their storage solutions still has plenty of room to grow, with a capacity that can be easily expanded to over 50TB before a data-in-place upgrade is needed. 

The final step for this implementation was disaster recovery. HBO+EMTBs disaster recovery strategy involved deploying a second Hitachi SAN at the companys disaster recovery site to enable cross-site replication and ensure complete data protection of their business critical assets. 

Hitachi isnt just a solution for now, it is a solution for the future, said Hunter. We are building a rock solid foundation to grow on. Our ultimate goal is to be able to snapshot data locally and then replicate it to the disaster recovery site, ensuring data protection and availability at all times, even in the event of a disaster. 

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To Hunter, the benefits of the new Hitachi solution are numerous. Scalability is no longer a concern as the SAN can expand easily to meet HBO+EMTBs current and future requirements. In addition, consolidation onto the SAN has simplified data management. All data will be managed centrally from Sydney without the need to travel to complete IT upgrades. With the SAN, the IT team is able to commission new storage easily with minimal, if any, downtime. Data recovery is also greatly improved. Should the team need to recover a file or an image, the process using the SAN takes only minutes where in the past it could have taken days.
 
For HBO+EMTB designers and architects, data accessibility and collaboration between offices will be done with ease. HBO+EMTB will support its pool of images on the SAN so that employees can better collaborate on projects across geographies, increasing the ability to share images and search through archived work for inspiration on new projects. In addition, employee expectations for expandable data storage will be met, as HBO+EMTB now has a platform for growth.

Many of HBO+EMTBs clients are repeat clients that are served on a national or international basis. The ability to quickly access data from previous projects done for these clients, or data from projects undertaken in different locations for the same client, is invaluable. In the past, designers have sometimes ignored data from HBO+EMTBs project library as it was too difficult or time-consuming to source. Now, collaboration among design teams in different locations is greatly increased due to ease of information sharing. Newer staff members can also more easily be brought up to speed on previous work, providing enormous benefit when working with repeat clients.  

Currently, HBO+EMTB is working on numerous design projects across Australia for an international finance company.  The company is a repeat client for whom HBO+EMTB undertook an Australian-wide rollout of new offices some years ago.

The centralized data system and vastly improved storage capacity have had a number of specific benefits for the project team:

	Improved access to data from the clients previous projects. A decrease in the time spent accessing the archived data has lead to quicker production of drawings that need to reference these older projects, and also has enabled new staff members to quickly familiarize themselves with the clients previous projects.
 
	With files centralized in one location, HBO+EMTB staff working on this clients project in Sydney can easily and quickly access drawings and data relating to the same clients project in Melbourne or any other city, and vice versa. Previously, as the data was located on local servers, a team member would have to rely on staff in the other office to find and transfer the data. Often there were large amounts of data needing to be transferred, meaning a long delay in accessing the information. 

Tina Berardi, Interior Design Director for HBO+EMTB Melbourne office says, The benefits of the new system have been immediately obvious on this current project. It is much quicker to access drawings from projects in other cities, which has encouraged the team to collaborate more with design staff in those locations. And eliminating the need to transfer large files between offices has been a great time-saver.

Following the selection of the new storage system, both Hitachi Data Systems and technology partner Itaba3 worked closely alongside HBO+EMTBs own IT team to plan and implement the IT upgrade. Although the initial conversation surrounded HBO+EMTBs immediate data management challenges, the conversation quickly moved to the broader growth aspirations of the business and how IT plays an integral role in supporting this growth. Rather than just dropping a box in HBO+EMTBs network, Itaba3 and Hitachi looked at the big picture. 

The implementation became a business solution rather than a quick fix, providing HBO+EMTB with storage to grow on. 

Jewels Nistico, Sales Director from Itaba3 says, Our goal for HBO+EMTB is to improve how information flows through their organization. Hitachis Modular Solution was the perfect fit to improve data accessibility, reduce management and lower costs. 

The most important obstacle HBO+EMTB faced when evaluating and implementing an updated storage management infrastructure was ensuring that the solution could handle the existing massive amount of data, was scalable enough to meet the future storage needs of the company, and had a centralized infrastructure that could be managed by a single, easy to use interface. 

In order to ensure compatibility with the new system, HBO+EMTB needed to upgrade a number of existing servers to work off of Microsoft Server 2003, but experienced no other major issues when installing or implementing the Hitachi solution.

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The IT team at HBO+EMTB has already witnessed their new solution having a positive effect on the administrative and business needs of the design house. From collaboration between international offices to IT upgrades, processes are simply faster and more reliable and are opening doors to new possibilities for employees and IT staff alike.  

For other companies that rely heavily on digitized and graphic data  as well as collaboration on the data between offices  installing a centralized SAN is priceless. With the old SAN infrastructure, each office would have to upgrade and maintain individual servers. This led to disparate pools of storage that each required their own management and administration staff and resources.  No economies of scale were obtainable, and this often led to duplication of efforts.

With the new system, Hunters team is able to take that on, meaning that employees can invest all of their time into delivering creative and innovative designsnot IT needs. 

The entire HBO+EMTB team was able to embrace the benefits of the upgrades almost immediately. Because the solution was so easy to install, it was up and running in very little time, which meant that employees could benefit from improved access and reliability right from the start. 

For the small IT department, the upgrades have significantly changed the roles of the day to day IT team. Rather than relying on a team of localized people traveling between remote offices for upgrades, HBO+EMTB is able to have one person dedicated to data and storage management. 

Furthermore, centralized infrastructure is supporting collaboration between offices, as employees from offices all over the world can share files and resources in real-time, with a centralized storage capacity that can expand with the companies needs.