Client Projects with a Hyperconverged Data Center
It Started With Storage.
Engineering demands a lot from a network. Surveys, base mapping, CAD files, Building Information Management (BIM) solutions, Geographic Information System (GIS) data, renderings, and video files all require a sturdy storage environment. When Brad Fortney, the IT Manager at The Thrasher Group, arrived in 2010, he quickly recognized that the storage environment wasn’t keeping pace with demand.
2“Just as Thrasher aims to deliver a seamless experience for its clients, it wants to provide that seamlessness to its engineers, consultants, staff, and specialty teams,” said Fortney. “We wanted to deliver fast, easy access to the data and applications they need.”
He initially chose storage from Scale Computing for the production environment and purchased more systems in 2012 for a disaster recovery site. When he saw that he could run his virtual machines and hypervisors on a hyperconverged storage platform, he was hooked. Thrasher’s philosophy is to give clients a great project at a reasonable rate, and Fortney extended that same philosophy to the IT infrastructure.
“We could consolidate functions and avoid multiple additional licenses and costs,” he said. “We migrated everything to the Scale Computing HC3 hyperconverged platform for both the production and DR environments.”
Fast-forward to 2016, and Thrasher has new storage demands. Aerial and drone mapping are used in data survey projects, and they generate huge video files for use in marketing presentations, mapping, and project design and implementation. When video is added to already-large CAD files, it places even more demand on the infrastructure. Thrasher began building a new data center to support growth into the future, which meant that Fortney needed more storage and a new switching network.
