Artelia relies on Dell’s Apex offer for its storage

Artelia is a consulting and construction engineering group. It operates in more than a hundred countries, with projects for construction, infrastructure and industry. After bringing its storage back in-house in 2014, the group wanted to upgrade it in 2020. Due to the uncertain context at that time, Artelia opted for an Isilon and PowerStore storage solution supplied on request by Dell, supported by Dell Financial Services and Cheops Technology.

In 2014, Artelia’s storage was completely outsourced. However, the service no longer met expectations in terms of backing up and restoring data, while the growth of the group made these issues essential: Artelia is committed to its customers to keep their strategic data (plans, reports) for a century. For this reason, the group asked its integrator Cheops Technology to reinternalize its entire storage infrastructure, opting for Isilon X410 NAS servers and VNX 5600 arrays.

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In 2020, existing solutions were nearing the end of maintenance. However, with the health crisis on the one hand, recent or ongoing acquisitions on the other, the group lacked visibility on its future storage needs. In this uncertain context, the digital department planned to extend the maintenance of its equipment for at least two additional years, before starting an overhaul of its infrastructure in 2022. However, it wanted to be able to upgrade its storage, with real visibility on current and future costs, while maintaining a solution that is easy to migrate, maintain and use. To this end, Artelia has initiated a reflection on on-demand storage with its integrator and Dell Financial Services.

The various partners proposed an environment consisting of two PowerStore 7000T boxes and two Isilon clusters, deployed as a scalable solution, Flex on Demand. This provides for a minimum consumption commitment of only 40% of the volume made available and includes maintenance, all over 24 months. “This aspect of consumption on demand has been favorable to us, because it has allowed us to continue in line with the solutions that suited us and to update them. We didn’t know what the future would hold, so this lease for two years allows us to be technologically up-to-date and in step with the group’s growth,” explains Franck Martel-Badinga, infrastructure and telecoms at Artelia. The group plans to take stock in 2022 to see if it continues with storage as a service or if it turns to purchasing. “This approach gives us visibility on costs and allows us to develop solutions in parallel with the group’s activities,” concludes Franck Martel-Badinga.