Leading Engineering Firm Leverages CloudFS to Enable Seamless Cross-Office Collaboration, Optimize Azure Storage Costs, and Eliminate File Conflicts Across International Teams
"With Panzura, we deployed ONE global cloud file system across all global sites, enabling engineers and designers to collaborate as ONE global team, dramatically increasing productivity and improving our bottom line."
—Henrik Carlberg, Business CIO
Significant storage cost savings achieved by automatically moving inactive and cold data to Azure's Cold Tier, optimizing cloud storage economics at scale.
Eliminated collaboration barriers with global file locking and byte-range locking, enabling distributed teams to work simultaneously on demanding applications like Revit without file collisions.
Dramatically reduced support tickets related to file locking, versioning, and ownership issues, freeing IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives rather than firefighting.
Real-time global collaboration across continents through a unified global namespace, allowing AFRY to leverage engineering talent from any location and instantly assign projects regardless of geography.
The Challenge: When Data Silos Constrain a Global Organization
AFRY, a global leader in engineering, design, and consulting with 18,000 engineers and partners across 100 offices worldwide, faced a significant challenge in modernizing its global enterprise file system. With a distributed workforce spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and heavy reliance on large project files—particularly for applications like Revit—AFRY needed a solution that could unify its disparate data silos, improve collaboration, and reduce the high costs and complexity of its aging infrastructure.
AFRY's legacy file platform was a patchwork of local storage solutions, leading to "file data silos" that hindered collaboration and created significant IT challenges across the organization.
Slow performance crippling productivity: End-users, especially those working remotely or across continents, experienced frustratingly slow file access and sync times. Engineers couldn't efficiently access the large design files essential to their work, creating bottlenecks in project delivery.
Aging infrastructure becoming unmaintainable: The network of storage nodes was difficult to maintain and urgently needed migration to modern platforms like Hyper-V and Azure. The technical debt accumulated from years of patchwork solutions was threatening operational stability.
Data inconsistencies derailing projects: The legacy system was plagued by downtime, corrupt files (such as 0 KB files), and broken metadata or locking mechanisms. These issues resulted in a high volume of support tickets and costly project delays that impacted client relationships.
Collaboration barriers limiting talent utilization: Teams were unable to work together in real-time on large-scale projects. This was particularly problematic for demanding applications like Revit, where slow model open times and lack of real-time collaboration tools limited productivity and made it impossible to leverage engineering talent across different geographic locations and time zones.
Technical Requirements
Unify disparate data silos into a single, coherent global file system
Enable real-time collaboration on massive engineering files across continents and time zones
Eliminate performance bottlenecks that prevented remote teams from working efficiently
Modernize aging infrastructure with seamless migration to contemporary platforms
Reduce infrastructure complexity and storage costs at enterprise scale
Ensure business continuity with minimal downtime during migrations and failovers
Provide comprehensive visibility into file operations, compliance, and system health
Traditional approaches couldn't meet these needs. Point solutions addressed individual symptoms but not the systemic architecture problem. AFRY needed a fundamental transformation of how file data was managed globally.
The Solution: Hybrid Multi-Cloud File Platform with Global Intelligence
AFRY chose to implement Panzura CloudFS, a hybrid multi-cloud file platform, to address these challenges comprehensively. The architecture of CloudFS provided the "single source of truth" that AFRY's distributed teams needed. The solution included a ring-based global architecture with distributed primary and failover nodes, which consolidated AFRY's scattered file data into a single, cohesive file system. This architecture ensures high availability and resilience across AFRY's global operations.
Unified Platform Delivering Multiple Capabilities
Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Azure, enabling regional Azure Blob tier optimization that automatically moves inactive and cold data to Azure's Cold Tier, significantly reducing storage costs while maintaining accessibility
Global file locking eliminates cross-site edit conflicts for large engineering and design files, enabling simultaneous collaboration across different offices without overwriting risks—essential for complex Revit models and demanding engineering applications
Instant Node reduces downtime during migrations and failover events, ensuring business continuity by enabling rapid deployment, restoration, or migration of CloudFS instances with minimal disruption
Provides deep analytics, search, and compliance tracking from a single dashboard, offering unprecedented visibility into file operations, user behavior, and system performance across the entire file network
Operational Transformation
Resolved file access and sync problems, increasing productivity and efficiency for remote and hybrid workers
Global file locking and byte-range locking enabled real-time collaboration on complex projects, allowing teams to leverage talent from any location and instantly shift resources to the right designers regardless of location—creating a major competitive advantage
Support tickets related to file locking, versioning, and ownership issues decreased significantly, freeing IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives rather than troubleshooting file synchronization problems
Infrastructure Optimization
Large portions of inactive or cold data successfully moved to Azure's Cold Tier, leading to significant storage cost savings and eliminating the need for expensive high-performance storage for infrequently accessed data
Cache statistics and overall performance improved, reducing problematic nodes over time while delivering consistent, high-performance file access across global operations
Instant Node functionality resulted in near-zero downtime for many migrations and failovers, ensuring business continuity and resilience
Integrated compliance features, including geofencing and advanced auditing, prepared AFRY for audits and strengthened reporting capabilities with centralized visibility that simplifies compliance management across the global organization. Automation, orchestration, and advanced data services simplified IT management and reduced manual interventions by replacing complex management of disparate storage systems with a unified platform.