CHALLENGE
Multiple offices, islands of data as a result of traditional NAS solutions at each office, inability to collaborate across offices and a crashing file server led Timmons Group to look for new technology.
Solution
CloudFS Collaboration for collaborative data, coupled with CloudFS Archive for storage delivers the speed, productivity, security and scalability the company needs as it grows.
Industry
Cloud
Timmons Group Improves Data Consolidation, Boosts Collaboration with CloudFS
Introducing Timmons Group, a firm that has spent the last 60 years providing civil engineering, design, structural, environmental, electrical, geotechnical, GIS/geospatial technology, landscape architecture, and surveying services to a variety of clients.
Timmons Group is a multi-disciplined engineering and technology firm recognized for nearly twenty years as one of Engineering News Record’s (ENR) Top 500 Design Firms in the country. Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Timmons Group has regional offices throughout Virginia and North Carolina.
With 16 offices across the United States bringing various Engineering and technological projects to life, it’s important that Timmons Group team members are able to collaborate efficiently via a reliable IT infrastructure. That’s why Timmons Group decided to implement Panzura CloudFS to consolidate their data, reap the benefits of a solid disaster recovery plan, and collaborate on projects with their bicoastal counterparts, taking their work to new heights as a result.
It has alleviated a burden from our support services team…Being able to restore a file quickly and efficiently has been a big win for my IT team and has helped us support our engineers.
Challenge: Eradicate Data Silos and Protect Branch Office Data
Previously, Timmons Group struggled with the data islands that emerged as a result of their servers being located in various offices. With approximately 650 employees scattered across multiple locations, it became difficult to share information and files with their distant team members. Adding to that, there was also the challenge of continuously keeping these individual systems up-to-date.
Ultimately, this led one of the file servers to crash, taking the office offline for an entire business day. Keeping the highly paid hourly contractors offline for 24 hours cost the firm millions of dollars in losses and was disastrous for their productivity standards. That’s when Timmons Group IT Manager Bryan Corcoran decided to look for a new solution to their storage problem.
When searching for a solution to these challenges, Corcoran knew he wanted a product that would remove data silos, implement a more robust disaster recovery plan, and reduce file duplication.
Moreover, Timmons Group uses Microsoft business and Corcoran wanted a solution that would work with their current Azure architecture. Corcoran also took into consideration what other AEC firms were using to support large CAD files. He recalled a former IT conference when he had stumbled across a Panzura booth. Fast forward a few years to this server crash, and Corcoran now had Panzura high on the list of solutions to try.
In order for Timmons Group to grow, he wanted to implement a solution that would absorb growth as the firm increased in size, staff, and data. With a larger workforce comes more files, and Corcoran wanted to ensure that these files would not only be easily transferable between offices, but also protected from potential outages. With this criteria in mind, Corcoran began implementing Panzura solutions.
Benefits: Cross-Office Collaboration and a Robust Disaster Recovery Plan
With Panzura CloudFS Collaboration and CloudFS Archive, Timmons Group was able to easily share data and onboard new acquisitions quickly. Thanks to these solutions, they have almost completely eliminated the duplicate backups from unstructured data and have consolidated their project drives from data silos to drives for each division of the firm.
Additionally, staff can now easily share data across offices with minimal latency. For example, an engineer from the Richmond headquarters traveled to the Raleigh office and experienced no change in performance, allowing him to continue working on projects with ease.
Before Panzura, it would have taken the engineer 5-6 minutes to load a file remotely. But with CloudFS in place, an off-site worker could load a file in less than a minute. This allows work from an overloaded office to be shifted to an office with lighter tasks, creating a more balanced workload across the firm.
With the help of Panzura CloudFS Collaboration and CloudFS Archive, this company can continue to provide architecture and surveying services to a multitude of clients in the AEC space in an efficient and collaborative manner.