Essex Property Trust, Inc. Locking Into File Sharing Somemes a business soluon doesn’t reveal its shortcomings unl aſter it has been implemented. Such was the experience of Essex Property Trust, Inc., a fully integrated real estate investment trust (REIT) with offices located in Northern California, Southern California and the state of Washington. Early in 2013, it implemented Nasuni as part of a centralized data store. Nasuni – which interconnects cloud storage with on-premise cloud controllers – resolved Essex’s issues with branch offices accessing data over slow file VPN connecons; however, the new soluon did not provide file locking. As employees started using the soluon on a daily basis, the lack of file locking quickly turned the soluon into a nightmare. With no noficaon of someone else working on a file, there were as many files as there were people working on them, and by the end of the day someone had to spend me merging these files into one. Despite their soluon vendor’s promises to fix this crical issue, it never happened. Forced to do a vendor evaluaon on a me crunch, Essex found many companies that promised file locking, only to discover these were not genuine file locking soluons. Only one company – Panzura – offered Essex a true global locking file system that was worth tesng in a proof of concept…and Panzura proved itself capable of providing the file locking Essex needed for its centralized file system. File Collaboraon Corrupon In early 2013, Essex was hampered by slow file access between its main office in Palo Alto and its branch offices in Woodland Hills, Irvine and San Diego, California, and Bellevue, Washington. The different branch offices were accessing their files over slow VPN connecons and suffered from extensive performance issues with the large Excel, Word and other standard file services, which could grow to between two and three gigabytes. Essex needed to find a way to manage this large, growing, data structure, while also being able to push it out to the branch offices to get some local-office-like performance. Essex selected Nasuni and implemented its global file system, placing two of its physical appliances in its Palo Alto office, while installing virtual machines at its branch offices. The company, which had no data retenon policy in place and was seeing an already large store of data connue to grow, believed its new cloud soluon would beer manage its file growth. “So the soluon was rolled out, but when people started using it on a day-to-day basis, it created an absolute nightmare with the file locking,” said Sam Ghnaim, Director of I.T. at Essex. “Users would open up a file in Woodland Hills, and then someone in Palo Alto would open that file, but there was no file locking system in place to nofy the users that someone else had the file open.” Case Study Situaon Snapshot: Corporate office in Palo Alto, branch offices in Woodland Hills, Irvine and San Diego, California, and Bellevue, Washington, and a data center in San Jose, which manage 250 properties in California and the state of Washington. • Challenge 1: File Locking — Essex needed to ensure their personnel were seeing the same information in the same files and ensuring that changes were being populated throughout the network in real time. Without file locking, the company had as many versions of files as people working on them, with the resulting file corruption costing the company time and money to have someone merge the files at day’s end. • Challenge 2: Performance Issues that Slowed Collaboration — files were centrally located in Palo Alto, but branch offices were not getting local file service performance; they would open an Excel file on a slow incline and being very large files they would take 2-3 minutes before the file would even open. • Challenge 3: Storage Savings — with no data retention policy in place, Essex was constantly adding more storage, an expensive proposition in itself, which was made more costly as it then backed up that data with additional snapshots.
Transcript
Essex Property Trust, Inc.
Locking Into File SharingSometimes a business solution doesn’t reveal its shortcomings until after it has been implemented. Such was the experience of Essex Property Trust, Inc., a fully integrated real estate investment trust (REIT) with offices located in Northern California, Southern California and the state of Washington. Early in 2013, it implemented Nasuni as part of a centralized data store. Nasuni – which interconnects cloud storage with on-premise cloud controllers – resolved Essex’s issues with branch offices accessing data over slow file VPN connections; however, the new solution did not provide file locking.
As employees started using the solution on a daily basis, the lack of file locking quickly turned the solution into a nightmare. With no notification of someone else working on a file, there were as many files as there were people working on them, and by the end of the day someone had to spend time merging these files into one. Despite their solution vendor’s promises to fix this critical issue, it never happened. Forced to do a vendor evaluation on a time crunch, Essex found many companies that promised file locking, only to discover these were not genuine file locking solutions. Only one company – Panzura – offered Essex a true global locking file system that was worth testing in a proof of concept…and Panzura proved itself capable of providing the file locking Essex needed for its centralized file system.
File Collaboration CorruptionIn early 2013, Essex was hampered by slow file access between its main office in Palo Alto and its branch offices in Woodland Hills, Irvine and San Diego, California, and Bellevue, Washington. The different branch offices were accessing their files over slow VPN connections and suffered from extensive performance issues with the large Excel, Word and other standard file services, which could grow to between two and three gigabytes. Essex needed to find a way to manage this large, growing, data structure, while also being able to push it out to the branch offices to get some local-office-like performance. Essex selected Nasuni and implemented its global file
system, placing two of its physical appliances in its Palo Alto office, while installing virtual machines at its branch offices. The company, which had no data retention policy in place and was seeing an already large store of data continue to grow, believed its new cloud solution would better manage its file growth.
“So the solution was rolled out, but when people started using it on a day-to-day basis, it created an absolute nightmare with the file locking,” said Sam Ghnaim, Director of I.T. at Essex. “Users would open up a file in Woodland Hills, and then someone in Palo Alto would open that file, but there was no file locking system in place to notify the users that someone else had the file open.”
Case Study
Situation Snapshot:Corporate office in Palo Alto, branch offices in Woodland Hills, Irvine and San Diego, California, and Bellevue, Washington, and a data center in San Jose, which manage 250 properties in California and the state of Washington.
• Challenge 1: File Locking — Essex needed to ensure their personnel were seeing the same information in the same files and ensuring that changes were being populated throughout the network in real time. Without file locking, the company had as many versions of files as people working on them, with the resulting file corruption costing the company time and money to have someone merge the files at day’s end.
• Challenge 2: Performance Issues that Slowed Collaboration — files were centrally located in Palo Alto, but branch offices were not getting local file service performance; they would open an Excel file on a slow incline and being very large files they would take 2-3 minutes before the file would even open.
• Challenge 3: Storage Savings — with no data retention policy in place, Essex was constantly adding more storage, an expensive proposition in itself, which was made more costly as it then backed up that data with additional snapshots.
With no warning that the file was already open, let alone the file being locked, Ghnaim said that if 10 people were working on the file at the same time, they could go into their folder and see 10 different versions of that same file. The “nightmare” was compounded by the need to have someone then spend the time trying to merge all those sets of data into one, cohesive file. The process created a critical business issue.
File Locking – First and ForemostGhnaim realized Essex needed a solution for its file locking issues and needed it fast. So not long after the Nasuni implementation, Essex found itself once again evaluating global file system solutions, only this time its number-one priority had changed:
• File Locking - File locking had proven to be the Achilles’ heel of Nasuni’s solution; Essex needed to ensure that all files in its new global file system were available to all users in real time, while protecting files from corruption due to different users trying to simultaneously write to the same file name.
• Network Performance - People in Essex’s branch offices would open an Excel file and it would take 2-3 minutes before the file would open. The solution had to provide those in the branch offices with local server performance without having to rebuild the company’s entire network.
• File Collaboration - The solution needed to facilitate collaboration by enabling real-time sharing between team members located in its main and branch offices.
• Data Administration - The solution needed to provide storage savings through improved data administration. By pushing data out into the cloud, the solution would help manage the company’s growing data-storage without having to continually spend more money to add storage.
Panzura Locks Down the Problem“As we did our vendor evaluation on a time crunch, we had to circle back and think about what the best technology was moving forward,” said Ghnaim. “We tried many different products out there and people would initially tell you they had a file locking system in place, but as we got deeper into the meetings and tried out the technology, it wasn’t a true file locking solution. Panzura had the only true file locking system that we felt was worth the proof of concept.”
This time, Essex tested its new solution throughout the company, not just within the IT Department and found that everything worked the way it should.
“Once we put the solution in place we saw an immediate positive result from it,” said Ghnaim. “From the user standpoint, from the internal resources standpoint, from a DR perspective, from a backup perspective…there was an immediate benefit throughout the entire company when we switched to Panzura solutions.”
Panzura worked so well out of the gate for Essex, that in April 2014, when it made its acquisition of BRE the largest West Coast apartment company, Essex expanded its Panzura implementation, installing Panzura in the BRE data centers where it was immediately able to see and share files between two different, complex networks.
“We feel that Panzura is an extension of our department; it’s a critical service that we’re offering and we’re really happy with it,” said Ghnaim. “I’m excited to work with Panzura. They’ve been a great help for us. Their technology has worked awesome!”
About Essex Property Trust, Inc.HEADQUARTERS: Palo Alto, CA | OFFICES NATIONWIDE: 6 | EMPLOYEES WORLDWIDE: 1,173
BACKGROUND: Essex Property Trust, Inc., is a fully integrated real estate investment trust (REIT) that acquires, develops, redevelops, and manages multifamily residential properties in selected West Coast communities, with offices located in Northern California, Southern California and the state of Washington. Since its founding in 1971, Essex has leveraged a sound real estate strategy and an experienced management team to boast one of the strongest financial portfolios in the Real Estate Industry.
With Panzura, Essex saw an immediate benefit from switching to Panzura from its previous vendor:
• Distributed File locking notified users when others were in a document, preventing them from making changes until the “lock” was granted to them.
• Offices no longer had their own “islands of data” – team members in each office running Panzura see one set of data stored in one central cloud storage system.
• The need for someone to physically merge data and files at the end of each day was eliminated.
• Changes to files now available to team members in different offices in real-time.
• Files backed up automatically in real-time throughout the day as opposed to once per day.
• Following the acquisition of BRE Properties, the largest West Coast apartment company, Essex was able to implement Panzura into the BRE data centers and was immediately able to see and share files between two different, complex networks.
