TBWA

As a global advertising agency network, the company has grown through acquisition, leaving varied systems for storage, backup and archive of data across the globe.  This is inefficient in terms of management, but as storage volumes continue to grow the cost of delivering storage at petabyte scale with traditional technologies becomes unsustainable – within the companies environment it was estimated that 20-30% of the data stored was duplicated across storage platforms, compounded by the use of traditional replication and offsite protection.

Acknowledging the need to bring commonality to this environment to overcome these challenges and enable collaboration on a global scale, the company’s embarked on a transformational programme to bring together one globally available storage platform that could enable collaboration, simplify storage operations (like backup) and reduce their cost base.

This was by no means a small task, with advertising agency groups with such scale proving to be extremely complex, particularly when considering the diverse nature of network and infrastructure environments, desktop platforms (circa 80% Apple Mac), file types and storage volumes.

Cloud, in one form or another, seemed to be the logical solution, but when centralising such large volumes of data, making it available to branch sites without the use of technologies like DFSR poses another challenge.  Like most organisations this approach was breaking new ground for the company so finding a partner that understood the commercial and technical challenges to delivering such a solution was key to the successful delivery of the project.