Datacom improves storage performance

Cardno is a professional infrastructure and environmental services company, with specialist expertise in the development and improvement of physical and social infrastructure for communities around the world. Cardno’s core business is the delivery of consulting services to governments and private organisations ranging from individuals through to multi-national corporations across the entire range of civil engineering, environmental and international development assistance activities."With its head office based in Brisbane, Cardno employs around 8,000 people in 290 offices worldwide.  

The Challenge

As an international organisation with large and complex global engineering projects, Cardno is dependent on ready access to detailed documentation and plans which require large amounts of storage. As the company continued to grow, they were finding that the existing legacy storage platform was ageing and becoming a bottleneck in the continual growth of important data and services. This necessitated having to Cardno run manual processes to move data to third tier archiving devices in order to enable normal business activities to run efficiently on primary systems.

Fully aware of the problem, Cardno’s IT department identified that they required a scalable, cost-effective technology to manage their existing environment and fulfil future needs. Based on these requirements, Cardno went to tender, looking for a trusted provider who could not only deliver a resilient and scalable platform to host their critical applications, but also assist them with their future IT requirements.

“Cardno has developed a strong working relationship with Datacom so we felt comfortable that they would have the capability to deliver on this project.  What also stood them apart was the amount of background work they put in to understand our requirements and then recommend a solution that they backed with a guarantee of success.” Darren Millar - Global IT Manager, Cardno.

The Solution

Datacom has been working with Cardno since 1998. Based on this proven working relationship combined with an existing understanding of their technology, Cardno chose Datacom, confident in our ability to deliver a cost-effective storage solution that would meet their current and future needs as well as being delivered within their critical timeframes.

While Datacom’s past experience working with the company put us in a good position the pressure was still on to understand their specific business needs around this project and then quickly deliver a comprehensive solution that would seamlessly improve efficiencies across the entire business, without any impact on their current operations.      

Datacom put in a lot of work to understand Cardno’s business needs, existing IT environment, hardware infrastructure, applications, and performance needs and then worked closely with the Cardno IT department to validate the information and discuss the various recommended solution options. By working closely with Cardno, Datacom was able to implement the latest HP 3Par solution that not only delivers greater levels of performance and functionality at a lower cost of ownership, but also maximised their storage to facilitate further expansion over the life of the equipment.

The Datacom solution has also simplified operations which has enabled the company’s IT staff to step back from previous time consuming manual tasks to focus their efforts on more beneficial business projects.