Services giant Mouchel is centralising its server infrastructure, deploying virtualisation and testing wide area network (WAN) acceleration to provide fast access to 40 terabytes of data.

The engineering firm, which runs large public sector infrastructure projects, runs servers at 120 UK sites with each requiring overnight back-up.

Trials of WAN acceleration products will begin over the next three to six months, with implementation to start between January and April 2009.

It is critical that data is secure and backed up, and that the move to a central system does not disrupt performance, said Gareth Nutt, group IT director at Mouchel.

“We have 40Tb of data and we know that about 15Tb of it hasn’t changed in two years. So the technology will allow users to archive data and retrieve it, without using our expensive frontline storage to deal with data that hasn’t been touched for years,” he said.

“WAN acceleration makes sense for us, because of our large amounts of data.”

Rollout of the legacy infrastructure replacement has begun, with data consolidation starting this autumn.

“We need to move to a virtualised platform which will use less power and be more efficient,” said Nutt.

“Our engineers produce huge files and when that data is retrieved over the wire, there’s a lag. WAN acceleration will give people out in the offices the same performance as they had when the server was local.”

Nutt said the complex data requirements means performance is key, and so far Riverbed’s technology has impressed him as “clever in the way it caches files and reads and writes changes”.

“We will recoup our investment in new technology by being able to manage data centrally with less people, because as we start rolling out Microsoft we’ll be looking to remove localised service,” said Nutt.