Ramboll transitions from on-premises file storage to the Cloud

Ramboll — a top architecture, engineering and consultancy firm, ranked 10th on the 2020 ENR list of International Design Firms — is the latest industry giant to make the shift to Nasuni to overcome the limitations of traditional on-premises network attached storage (NAS) . In just a few months, Ramboll has grown its usage to three petabytes (PB), relying on Nasuni to store, protect and manage file data across 300 remote offices. The result has been simplified IT, lower costs, greater company agility and better collaboration for a user base of thousands. 

Today’s AEC companies are engaged in global projects; employees around the world need to be able to collaborate on massive files in remote locations. Ramboll partners with clients to create the infrastructure behind sustainable societies, routinely drawing upon the expertise of engineers and architects from many countries. As the firm built upon this model, slow recovery, infrastructure maintenance, insufficient scalability, application latency and data issues arose, making the shortfalls of traditional, on-premises network attached storage (NAS) and file servers all too apparent. Nasuni enables AEC organizations to shed legacy storage infrastructure and adopt a cloud-first approach, as well as to consolidate NAS, backup, file sync, remote access and disaster recovery “silos” with a single, unified global file solution.  

Ramboll IT Project Manager, Morten Madsen, recalled: “We were pleasantly surprised by Nasuni’s ease-of-use and how the platform delivered the same file server experience as NetApp, but with a much smaller local disk footprint.”  

As Ramboll’s IT leaders began researching solutions, they discovered Nasuni and the multiple capabilities of its cloud service. Foremost, Nasuni consolidates all file storage silos in cloud object storage, while caching copies of frequently accessed files via lightweight Nasuni Edge Appliances wherever Ramboll needed high-performance access. The deployment began with 200 terabytes (TB) backed by Microsoft Azure Blob storage and supported by Edge Appliances in different branches. When the pandemic hit, Ramboll’s storage needs quickly grew as all workers were remote, and now that they had unlimited capacity on-demand, deployment was increased to three petabytes (PB). 

“Nasuni makes a lot of sense because it gives us unlimited object-based file storage in the cloud and the flexibility of deploying a new appliance within two hours in order to make data available somewhere else,” added Madsen. “As a long-time NetApp customer, we evaluated their cloud offering, but Nasuni’s cloud native architecture was superior in terms of cost and performance.” 

Unstructured data has been doubling every two to three years fueling Nasuni’s growth. The Nasuni service provides unlimited storage, fast global access, centralized management and built-in data protection. Backup is automatic and can be conducted as often as every five minutes without any impact on the production environment, and recovery is near instantaneous. Nasuni routinely delivers all this at about half the total cost of legacy, on-premises network attached storage. 

“As enterprises hurry to move away from on-premises infrastructure and consolidate in the cloud, the limitations of traditional NAS and backup are becoming more apparent. Top AEC firms like Ramboll require a degree of resilience, collaboration, performance, and agility that traditional infrastructure cannot provide,” said Andres Rodriguez, founder and chief technology officer at Nasuni. “Coupled with cloud object storage like Azure Blob, Nasuni makes it easy for organizations to store, protect, synchronize and access file data from anywhere in the world.”