Case Study: Gensler achieves 50% data reduction and 4x faster archiving with Riverbed Whitewater

Riverbed Whitewater Appliances Hold Astounding Promise for Architectural Firm with Vast Quantities of Data

Gensler, a San Francisco–based architecture, design, and planning firm with about 2,900 professionals across 32 offices and roughly 3,000 projects a year, faced a growing data-retention problem: roughly a terabyte of active data per employee and about 4.5 TB archived annually that must be kept 15–20 years. Their existing mirrored optical-disk archiving system became obsolete when the vendor folded, and large WAN backups and escalating maintenance costs made scaling physical storage impractical.

Gensler deployed Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage gateways to move archives to Amazon S3, using deduplication and transfer optimization to shrink and speed data movement. The solution delivered about 50% average data reduction (up to 76%), a four- to five-fold increase in bandwidth utilization for faster transfers, roughly 15–20% lower five-year cost versus replacing optical systems, and reduced ongoing maintenance—enabling a viable long-term cloud archive and consideration of moving daily backups to the cloud.

Gensler

Bruce Bartolf

Chief Technology Officer