Atkins and IBM Sign $21.4 Million Managed Storage Agreement

IBM and Atkins, a design and engineering consultancy group in the U.K., announced a five-year managed storage agreement. The IBM solution will put in place the infrastructure and tools needed to manage the storage environment across the business. The agreement will empower Atkins consultants to manage their data personally, while also making costs more transparent to the business.

Atkins provides expertise to resolve complex challenges, planning, designing and enabling projects from skyscrapers to rail network upgrades. Each project amasses a large amount of vital data that must be accessible and secure throughout the planning, design and enable stages. With data volumes growing at a rate of 50-60% year-on-year, Atkins selected IBM to help them manage the ever increasing data mountain.

In a two-phased approach, IBM will transition data away from Atkins’ regional offices, to reduce the overall storage load. This will include IBM’s leading-edge approach to move away from a managed back-up process. Secondly, IBM will convert data to a ‘Write Anywhere File System’ format as it is moved onto a new IBM managed service, central storage location based on an IBM N-Series storage array.

Mike Russell, Group IS Director at Atkins said: "We recognised that the growth of data was hurting our business flexibility and efficiency, so we asked IBM to help identify and implement a solution to give us the ability to control our data needs today, and also be flexible in dealing with future growth. Atkins consultants need flexible and manageable data storage in support of demanding infrastructure projects. This new service will help us respond to the quickly changing demands of the business."

Mike Jackson IBM General Business Territory Director South at IBM UK said: "We’re putting in place a low risk migration plan addressing the complexities of the existing environment and business dependencies which will see Atkins benefit from significant service improvements and also reduce Atkins’ carbon footprint associated with data management."

IBM’s business partner, GlassHouse Technologies, is working alongside IBM during the migration phase.

The contract was signed in February 2009.