“Within 8 weeks, the bulk of the project was delivered and our storage pressures and constraints had disappeared. We have recently won a large contract with a large global online retail company that will generate an additional 100 TB of data above our normal annual data growth of 300 TB this year. Being faced wit the prospect of having to deal with a half a petabyte of data growth in one year would have been a major issue that would have gone to board level, but now we don’t give it a second thought as the CTERA solution has multipetabyte capacity.”
Kieron Goucher, IT Manager - Murphy Geospatial
About Murphy Geospatial
Murphy Geospatial captures, collates, verifies and governs geospatial data, providing critical surveys and data their clients need to work with confidence, and maximize efficiencies across the project lifecycle. With an international team that includes over 300 experts working on projects across 5 countries, employees are widely dispersed between offices, construction sites, work-from-home setups, and field-based teams.
The Challenge
Every day, large data sets of up to 1.2 TB in size are generated by engineers in the field, who need to get the data back to an office file server as quickly as possible to be analyzed, and so that teams of people across multiple offices and countries can collaborate on this data.
Standard file services, site-to-site VPNs, and client VPNs were being pushed beyond their limits; and, backup, disaster recovery, and SAN storage systems were becoming prohibitively expensive. What’s more, the size and the type of files that are generated rules out using OneDrive, SharePoint and Azure files, as it goes beyond their limitations.
Constantly running out of storage space was affecting the overall growth of the company and their ability to take on new and bigger projects.
A new storage system was desperately needed – one that was profitable, scalable, highly secure, ISO 27001:2013 and CIS benchmarking compliant. It also needed to be able to scale to be over a petabyte over the next 3 years.
Added pressure came from the fact that Murphy Geospatial had run out of physical storage, and so the new solution needed to be implemented as quickly as possible.
The CTERA Solution
CTERA, the cyber-resilient file services platform from edge to any cloud, provided a cost-effective solution to extend Murphy Geospatial’s storage.
In this case, the solution consists of a combination of a CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform with Wasabi Cloud Storage to store the data. Once synced to the cloud, the data is automatically made available to the remote offices via the CTEA Edge Filers, caching agents on laptops and desktops, or directly via the web portal, similar to SharePoint.
The CTERA file system solution was deployed in Azure with 7 CTERA virtual cloud caching gateway storage appliances of various sizes – from 16 TB to 128 TB – across all the main offices.
- All 300+ engineers received a CTERA Agent installed on their laptops for local caching
- Over 300 TB of data was migrated to CTERA via the CTERA Edge Filer
- Each CTERA Filer would show all 300 TB of data to the users located in each office, but only the active data for each office would be cached locally – the rest of the data would be stubbed to conserve physical local storage space
- Each CTERA Agent can access all 300 TB of data via stubbed files, and only active data would be cached on the local laptop – allowing engineers to upload data to CTERA and make it available to all 300 users and all offices immediately
Tremendous benefits flowed to the customer, including:
- 50% cost savings over three years compared with competitors
- The newly set up environment achieved Microsoft’s highest-available security score according to its best practice security score benchmark
- An audit report proving compliance with ISO 27001:2013 and CIS benchmark controls from the Azure Security center is constantly available, and was sent to the customer’s board to satisfy their internal regulatory audit requirements
- The customer received maximum security, compliance, backup, as well as a full managed services
CTERA enabled these benefits thanks to, among other competencies:
- The CTERA environment deployed on Azure is built to ISO 27001 and CIS benchmarking standards
- The CTERA platform is FIPS 140-2 certified which means it is approved to be used by the US military and US government
- Snapshot backups taken every 5 minutes inside the CTERA system mean individual files can be recovered by users, or the whole dataset can be recovered seamlessly
- CTERA stores data in a compressed and deduplicated format which reduces the data footprint by up to 50%, resulting in an immediate cost savings
CTERA’s Cloud File Storage Solution
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform provides a world-leading Global File system complete with automatic backup, replication, deduplication and data encryption. Its architecture modernizes and unifies remote file storage, multi-site collaboration and backup across dispersed enterprises.
Easy to deploy and manage, CTERA Edge Files replace traditional file servers/NAS and work with the CTERA Portal to provide a cost-effective cloud storage solution that delivers secure edge-to-cloud file services.
With CTERA, your organization will get:
- Seamless file access from anywhere
- Access cloud storage directly from Windows and Mac Desktops
- Global File System Architecture
- Multi-Folder Sync
- Backup, replication and deduplication
- Secure data access
- The highest level of data encryption
- Increased productivity especially for your remote workforce
- Fast and effective ransomware recovery