Case Study: Environmental Systems Design achieves scalable, automated data protection and fast disaster recovery with Nasuni

Automated Protection and Enhanced Productivity

Environmental Systems Design (ESD) is a global architecture and engineering firm headquartered in Chicago with about 280 employees and roughly 15 TB of active project data at any time. The firm’s designers use workload-intensive tools (AutoCAD, Revit) across 250 projects, and IT repeatedly outgrew backup solutions: network-taxing backups were deferred or disabled, retention was limited, and traditional disk-to-disk upgrades were prohibitively expensive.

ESD adopted Nasuni’s enterprise storage-as-a-service, deploying local Filers that cache data for local performance while sending deduplicated snapshots to the cloud for unlimited versioning and fast disaster recovery. The migration was seamless, backups now run automatically without impacting users, WAN traffic and costs are reduced by a capacity-based pricing model, and IT gained predictable scaling, indefinite restore capability, and improved collaboration across offices.

Environmental Systems Design

Mark Andersen

VP of Information Technology