Traffic Planning and Design, Civil Engineering Firm in Pennsylvania, Chooses AC&NC JetStor Storage

Traffic Planning and Design, Inc. (TPD) is a civil engineering firm with a focused mission to improve the quality of life for the public through planning and designing safe and efficient transportation systems.

To this end, the firm as founded in 1989 with 6 employees to support the design of highways and the optimization of traffic flows. They expanded their service offerings to include bridge design and environmental permitting, and then municipal engineering, traffic signal design, bridge inspection, construction management and inspection, and expert witness support for crash investigations. They often work with public sector entities like state departments of transportation, as well as with private sector developers on various infrastructure projects.

Headquartered in Pottstown, PA, 40 miles from Philadelphia, TPD is growing. In 2022, it hired another 75 people and have 250 employees spread across 14 offices in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The firm is adding more sites in these states as well as in Delaware and New York.

Nearly all enterprises must backup their business data for various periods of time. Few, however, confront the challenge of backing up and retaining their business data for 12 years. The end user retains files created by standard applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint of the Microsoft Office suite or a year, but it is the firm’s core business files that demand 12-year retention.

Its staff routinely use sophisticated engineering applications such as Bentley MicroStation, which is CAD software for infrastructure design, Bentley OpenRoads Designer, CAD software for designing roads, Miovision camera-based traffic data collection, and Autodesk Civil 3D for modeling civil infrastructures. As an engineering firm designing structures for public and private use, it has a 12-year data retention policy out of necessity which means they need a lot of storage.

“To protect against our liabilities and ensure we’re competitive, TPD demanded backup that was economical and reliable,” said Christopher Conti, senior system administrator, TPD. “A colleague at another engineering firm recommended a JetStor solution from AC&NC so we deployed one. After 5 years of flawless performance, we purchased a second and then a third.”

Solution: 

• One JetStor 816iX iSCSI platform from AC&NC
• Two JetStor 816iS systems from AC&NC

System Configuration: 

• One JetStor 816iX iSCSI system with 16 12TB SATA drives
• One JetStor 816iS system with 16 8TB SAS drives
• One JetStor 816iS system with 16 4TB SATA drives
• Veeam Backup and Recovery software
• Cisco Meraki and Catalyst 3850 switches

Benefits realized
TPD has been meeting their long-term retention policy for a decade thanks to their JetStor platforms. The 3 devices provide 384TB of total capacity and handle the firm’s daily backups, which include such data as CAD drawings, PDFs, and video surveillance of traffic counts

“Day in and day out, our JetStor systems deliver rock-solid performance and resiliency, making them very competitive with much costlier enterprise products from big-name vendors,” said Conti. “12 years is a long time to store vital data, but our JetStor solutions have proven more than up to the task. Moreover, AC&NC has provided us with responsive service. They very much stand behind their products, which gives us further confidence in the JetStor brand.“

How we did it?
TPD deployed 3 3U, 16-bay JetStor 816 chassis in their Pottstown, PA data center. The JetStor 816iX platform has 16x12TB SATA drives for 198TB of capacity. The JetStor 816iS has 16x8TB SAS totaling 128TB and the other JetStor 816iS has 4TB SATA drives for 64TB.

All 3 arrays are configured or RAID-6, which protects data vs. the failure of 2 disks.

TPD relies on the JetStor SANOS management software that comes with the arrays.

“I very much like how I can proactively manage and monitor our JetStor arrays from any browser, making the software comparable to higher-end solutions,” said Conti. “JetStor SANOS management application is another reason why our JetStor arrays are such a good value.“

TPD uses Veeam Backup and Recovery software to orchestrate backups. A server running the Veeam application connects to a Cisco Meraki switch, which in turn connects to all 3 JetStor chassis. All the connections are multiple 10Gb/s links for redundancy except for multiple 4Gb/s links to one JetStor 816iS system.

Backups are performed nightly, with changed files or important workloads backed up twice a day. The engineering firm backups on average several hundred gigabytes of data each day.

Conclusion
With a 12-year retention policy for many of their files, TPD demands truly reliable storage for the long haul.

“There aren’t a whole lot of economical options that provide enterprise storage and JetStors arrays do so at an affordable price point,” concluded Conti. “I got one and it worked well for 5 years and I got another and then another after that. Over the years, they’ve proven to be dependable and a great value.“