Customer suCCess rutherford & Chekene minimizing It risks with symantec and Irvine Consulting services Builds success at top engineering Firm To boost engineer productivity and reduce IT risks, Rutherford and Chekene turned to Symantec and Irvine Consulting Services for IT solutions. Results include 200 hours saved in migration to Microsoft Windows 7, enhanced data protection with a 75 percent reduction in backup administration time, improved virus scanning without sacrificing system performance, and increased service uptime resulting in 100 percent payback in less than a year. standing strong Northern California is known for big earthquakes—and great architecture. It’s the job of Rutherford & Chekene (R&C) to make the later possible despite the former. R&C is an 85-person San Francisco-based engineering firm that provides structural and geotechni- cal engineering services to top architects. In its 50-year history, it has a long list of awards for helping to make possible stunning hospitals, laboratories, museums, sports complexes, and educational facilities. Some are pictured at www.ruthchek.com. There’s the internationally-acclaimed new de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Also shown is the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, an elegant 100-year old Beaux Arts structure at UC Berkeley that many thought doomed because it stands just 800 feet from the Hayward fault. With the help of R&C, the classic building has been rehabilitated. Now on rubber shocks, it can move horizontally if necessary as much as 27 inches to avoid damage from a severe earthquake. To be part of the team developing solutions like these, R&C’s engineers press the limits of their workstations and IT infrastructure. Over the years, they’ve turned to Symantec to boost productiv- ity and minimize a number of IT risks. orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe Website: www.ruthchek.com Industry: Construction Headquarters: San Francisco, California employees: 85 symANteC soLutIoNs Client Management Data Protection Endpoint Security Storage Management Why symantec? · Endpoint management costs and time saved · Superior data protection · Ability to perform virus scans without sacrificing performance · Uptime increased
Transcript
Customer suCCess
rutherford & Chekene minimizing It risks with symantec and Irvine Consulting services Builds success at top engineering Firm
To boost engineer productivity and reduce IT risks, Rutherford and Chekene turned to Symantec and Irvine Consulting Services for IT solutions. Results include 200 hours saved in migration to Microsoft Windows 7, enhanced data protection with a 75 percent reduction in backup administration time, improved virus scanning without sacrificing system performance, and increased service uptime resulting in 100 percent payback in less than a year.
standing strong
Northern California is known for big earthquakes—and great architecture. It’s the job of Rutherford & Chekene (R&C) to make the later possible despite the former.
R&C is an 85-person San Francisco-based engineering firm that provides structural and geotechni-cal engineering services to top architects. In its 50-year history, it has a long list of awards for helping to make possible stunning hospitals, laboratories, museums, sports complexes, and educational facilities.
Some are pictured at www.ruthchek.com. There’s the internationally-acclaimed new de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Also shown is the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, an elegant 100-year old Beaux Arts structure at UC Berkeley that many thought doomed because it stands just 800 feet from the Hayward fault.
With the help of R&C, the classic building has been rehabilitated. Now on rubber shocks, it can move horizontally if necessary as much as 27 inches to avoid damage from a severe earthquake.
To be part of the team developing solutions like these, R&C’s engineers press the limits of their workstations and IT infrastructure. Over the years, they’ve turned to Symantec to boost productiv-ity and minimize a number of IT risks.
orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe
Website: www.ruthchek.com
Industry: Construction
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
employees: 85
symANteC soLutIoNs
Client Management
Data Protection
Endpoint Security
Storage Management
Why symantec?
· Endpoint management costs and time saved
· Superior data protection
· Ability to perform virus scans without sacrificing performance
· Uptime increased
Customer suCCess rutHerFord & CHekeNe
saving 200 hours migrating to Win 7
One recent challenge was that the firm’s custom-built workstations were getting over-whelmed. Windows XP limited them to a maximum of three gigabytes of RAM.
“Meanwhile, our industry is at a tipping point,” explains David Bleiman, president and chief executive officer at R&C. “Design documents are now in 3D, and models of complex, high-tech buildings have expanded exponentially. There are hospitals of one mil-lion square feet and their models are detailed down to the placement of every keyboard and mouse. Some 3D files can be as big as 250 megabytes. On Windows XP, we had to wait for machines to respond with every click of the mouse.”
The answer was to adopt the 64-bit Windows 7 operating system, which has enabled R&C to upgrade its workstations to 12 gigabytes of RAM. The firm also took the opportunity to standardize disk images and motherboards across its systems.
“We surveyed our users and for the first time came up with a standard set of applications for every engineering workstation,” says Blei-man. “That will save the firm a projected 20 percent in deployment and administration time,” adds David Irvine, president of Irvine Consulting Services, a Symantec Partner that provides the firm’s outsourced IT services.
To deploy Windows 7, R&C uses Symantec Ghost™ Solution Suite. “Symantec Ghost Solution Suite saves us a couple hours per endpoint in application deployment time,” Irvine observes. “With 95 workstations, that’s at least 200 hours.”
If a workstation ever misbehaves, R&C reim-ages it with Ghost Solution Suite instead of troubleshooting it, says Irvine. “We blast it back to the standard image, and users are right where they need to be in less than an hour,” he says. “That compares to a day if we re-built the workstation application by ap-plication.”
Engineers love the performance improve-ment they’re getting from Windows 7 and more RAM, Irvine confirms. “Windows 7 is
taking a situation that was really unworkable and making it very facile,” he says. “The im-provement in speed alone is making everyone all smiles.”
Backup you can count on
Another challenge was data protection. Back-ing up the firm’s three terabytes of data us-ing CA ARCserve took longer than a weekend, which was the available backup window.
“The backup success rate was below 50 per-cent with ARCserve,” Irvine says. R&C switched to Symantec Backup Exec™ and can now stay within the window while almost doubling the backup success rate to 90 per-cent. “So far,” Irvine adds, “we’ve had a re-covery success rate of 100 percent.”
soLutIoNs At A GLANCe
key Challenges
• Streamline Windows 7 migration and administration
• Workstations: 64-bit custom-built with 12 gigabytes RAM
• Server platform: HP ProLiant running VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003
• Applications: Autodesk Revit, Deltek Vision, Newforma Project Center
• Databases: Microsoft SQL Server
• Storage: HP StorageWorks MSA1500 SAN
• Tape library: Dell PowerVault LTO-4
BusINess resuLts ANd teCHNICAL BeNeFIts
• 200 hours saved migrating to Microsoft Windows 7
• 90% backup success and 100% recovery success, up from less than 50%
• 75% reduction in backup administration time
• Enhanced uptime/100% payback in less than a year for SAN/Veritas Storage Foundation
“In the 10 years we’ve worked with
Irvine Consulting Services, they’ve
brought us a high level of service
so that we can count on them in an
emergency. Beyond that, they keep
us current with the latest technology
and that’s very important.”
david Bleiman
President and CEO
Rutherford & Chekene
Customer suCCess rutHerFord & CHekeNe
Notes Bleiman: “About once a month we need to recover data, and we can count on Symantec Backup Exec.”
Irvine points out that Symantec Backup Exec has reduced backup administration time by 75 percent. “My team services about 100 Bay Area firms and we religiously deploy Symantec Backup Exec,” he explains. “We have our hands under the hood a lot, and Backup Exec’s GUI interface just makes us more proficient. We can get most tasks done by remote control. And the proactive email notifications save a lot of time for us and our customers.”
Gaining critical uptime with Veritas storage Foundation
As R&C grew over the years, the firm added more servers, and each server became an important island of data. “The server platters were pretty full,” Irvine observes. “Instead of adding RAID arrays to these islands, we chose to create a storage area network (SAN) using an HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA).”
The goal was to increase service availability. “Before the SAN, we had islands of data on Snap Servers from Overland—they were mature and began to have escalating failure rates. Sometimes multiple drives in a RAID 5 array would fail, and we’d have to do a disas-ter recovery on that subset of data. That meant 20 to 30 employees lost productivity. We had this happen three times in a year—and this was why we decided to commit funds to a SAN.”
The SAN added redundancy at the physical hard drive level, Irvine points out. And be-cause it was connected to dual fabric, there was also redundancy at the fabric connectiv-ity level.
“But we really needed to know that we had redundancy at the host level,” Irvine explains. “So we brought in Veritas Storage Founda-
tion™ from Symantec to cluster our hosts and give them multiple paths to the network. The result has been much more uptime.”
R&C is taking advantage of the Dynamic Multi-Pathing feature of Veritas Storage Foundation, which has intelligent algorithms to load-balance storage I/Os across multiple host bus adapters (HBAs) for faster through-put. The feature increases an application’s availability by rerouting I/Os to an available data path in the event of a path failure.
The solution has offered R&C engineers im-proved access to their Autodesk Revit files on the network. “The impact has been pro-found,” Irvine says. “By helping us avoid downtime, Veritas Storage Foundation and the HP SAN have boosted productivity and paid for themselves in the first year.”
Virus protection without sacrifice
Another challenge the R&C engineers faced was performance drag during daily virus scans. In order to protect its system from at-tack, the firm had deployed an antivirus product from Computer Associates. “They had been relying on the product for about 10 years, but the engineers would complain whenever a scan would run,” Irvine relates. “They really felt like their solution was killing productivity.”
Now R&C employees are being protected by Symantec Endpoint Protection, which the company is using to scan websites and emails for viruses. With Symantec Endpoint Protec-tion in place, security is easily managed from a central console and productivity is back.
“They feel like they shouldn’t have to sacri-fice performance for security,” Irvine says. “With Symantec Endpoint Protection, the engineers are no longer complaining.”
Partnerships making a difference
At R&C, Bleiman appreciates the difference his technology partner is making. “In the 10 years we’ve worked with Irvine Consulting Services, they’ve brought us a high level of service so that we can count on them in an emergency,” Bleiman says. “This is really important to us because if our server goes down, the whole company goes down. But I also think that beyond that, they keep us cur-rent with the latest technology and make sure that our systems and our business mod-els are compatible with our clients, and that’s very important.”
Dave Irvine, in turn, appreciates the differ-ence Symantec makes for his company and customers such as R&C. “Symantec has my back,” he says. “Of all the partners we use, Symantec is right at the very top.”
Literally yesterday, he says, an engineer on his team hit a challenge while working at another customer’s business. “I had him contact Symantec and the customer was back up and running quickly,” Irvine reports. “Often when a customer is saying “thank you” to me, I’m saying “thank you” to Symantec in the back of my mind. And here at R&C, that’s been true a number of times.”
![Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) · 2013-05-14 · Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry . Quiz [3] “natural” unit in](https://static.documents.pub/doc/80x56/5fb3ede1e819350a63085fbf/rutherford-backscattering-spectrometry-rbs-2013-05-14-rutherford-backscattering.jpg)
