Timmons Deploys EMC Information Infrastructure Solutions

May 17 -- EMC Corp., a provider of information infrastructure solutions, has announced that Timmons Group, a diversified civil engineering and collaborative environmental design firm, has implemented EMC storage, software and services to manage more cost-effectively and with greater reliability the massive amounts of data generated by its large-scale geographic information systems (GIS).
As a civil engineering firm, Timmons Group of Richmond, Virginia, generates large GIS mapping files from real-time photography and 3-D virtual models for everything from utility poles to storm drains and underground pipelines, Timmons Group said. A single project requires 500 MB (megabytes) of data, the company said. EMC information infrastructure enables Timmons Group to store its data more intelligently to deliver targeted levels of performance and reliability for both its data-intensive applications and less demanding test and administrative environments, Timmons Group added. This deployment has resulted in cost savings for the company, Timmons Group added.

Timmons Group had initially replaced its Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) SAN (storage area network) with an EMC CLARiiON SAN, EMC of Hopkinton, Massachusetts said. As projects continued to increase in size and complexity, Timmons migrated to a dual-protocol EMC CLARiiON CX3-20 UltraScale FC/iSCSI system, which features combined fibre channel and iSCSI (Internet SCSI) connectivity in a single storage array to give customers the flexibility to easily and cost-effectively consolidate information from and between disparate networks, EMC added.

EMC’s products allow Timmons Group to continue using its existing hardware and extend the life of its HBA (host bus adapter) investment, while attaching more servers to its back-end SAN, Timmons Group said. By using the EMC CLARiiON CX3-20's fibre channel connectivity for its large-scale application files and Oracle 10G and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases, Timmons Group has avoided bottlenecks when pulling that data over the LAN (local area network), Timmons Group said. As the group’s development environment is less demanding, it uses the CLARiiON's iSCSI connectivity to provide a staging area for developing and testing code, as well as to house email, Microsoft Word documents, PDF (portable document format) files and other departmental data such as RFPs (request for proposals) and scope of work, Timmons Group added.

While optimizing performance and reducing the cost of ownership for data storage has been a major factor while utilizing the EMC information infrastructure solution, the flexibility, scalability and ability to use their existing IT investment have given Timmons Group a competitive edge, EMC said last week.

With the EMC solution, Timmons Group can house multiple virtual servers and develop and test its applications on the fly, Timmons Group said. The costs savings are huge, especially since it gives the design firm the flexibility to handle various environments that its clients may have in the future, without deploying additional servers, which will enable the group to reach out to a much broader customer base, Timmons Group added.

Timmons Group has also achieved cost savings with the EMC Celerra networked attached storage (NAS) gateway connected to the CLARiiON CX3-20, EMC said. By storing its critical information such as Microsoft Exchange email on Celerra, Timmons has been able to consolidate from four files servers down to one, thus freeing several thousand dollars worth of hardware to be redeployed elsewhere in the company, the company said. On account of the performance of the CLARiiON iSCSI connection to the Celerra, Timmons will continue to use the gateway solution to support Exchange 2007 as it migrates toward that environment, EMC added.

As part of its next generation backup strategy, Timmons Group also implemented the latest version of EMC Replication Manager software to facilitate faster backup and recovery processes, EMC said.

It used to take Timmons Group about 16 hours to clone its SQL Server 2005 databases to a backup server and then backup that data to tape for offsite storage, Timmons Group said. This process impacted system performance on a busy workday, the firm said. EMC Replication Manager has narrowed the backup window by over 250 percent, it added. The firm can now clone its entire 1.5 TB (terabytes) of data and back up to tape in about six hours, it said. This ensures that the firm can quickly and easily recover its business-critical information, Timmons Group added.