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Case Study: Dant Clayton
AEC, Case Study

Background

Headquartered in Louisville, KY, Dant Clayton is a leading designer and manufacturer of aluminum bleachers, grandstands, stadium structures, and accessory products. The company has provided aluminum bleachers for the stadiums of leading sports programs like the New York Yankees, San Francisco Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, the University of Oklahoma, and Ohio State.

The Challenge

High cost of CAD workstations, decentralized IT, reliability, and security

Dant Clayton felt it was spending too much on purchasing and maintaining expensive local hardware. Its high-powered CAD workstations cost an average of $3,000+/unit, for example, and needed to be replaced every 3-5 years.

The firm also wanted to improve its disaster recovery setup. They wanted to be able to quickly and fully recover their systems and data in the event of a disaster. Their need to store a lot of CAD data locally, as well as workers only being able to access their CAD applications from workstations at the office, made this difficult.

“With IronOrbit’s GPU Cloud desktops, every user now has the power and functionality of a high end CAD station while taking advantage of the latest in Cloud security, accessibility and cost-efficiency. The customizability & scalability of the platform have made it easy for us to add employees & expand as needed, as well as attract & retain the best engineering talent with a work-from-home option.” – Matthew Harper, VP of Technology

The company also desired anywhere, any device CAD access, which would allow it to attract and retain engineering talent with a work-from-home option, and to maintain a consolidated IT between its two locations. This capability would also make it easier for them to share their CAD assets with remote contractors and project stakeholders.

In addition, Dant Clayton needed the solution to be reliable and secure enough for their needs as a manufacturer, since any downtime could severely impact their operations, and they had to worry about intellectual property (IP) theft and sabotage. They also had to maintain consistent records for legal and compliance reasons.

The Solution

INFINITY cloud-based CAD workstations

A cloud-based CAD infrastructure would reduce Dant Clayton’s local hardware costs and provide it with a robust, multi-site disaster recovery setup.

Setting up a cloud-based CAD infrastructure can be extremely difficult, however, due to the power and complexity of the applications and the sizes of the files involved (often 100 MB+). Only a small number of cloud providers offered the service at the time, including IronOrbit.

Reliability, security, and compliant data storage would not be such a challenge, since these features come standard with all IronOrbit solutions.

In the end, IronOrbit provided Dant Clayton with a 114-user cloud-based CAD infrastructure that supported all its applications, including AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and Bluebeam.

IronOrbit’s cloud CAD solution helped Dant Clayton helped Dant Clayton lower its costs, enhance its disaster recovery setup with multi-site replication, consolidate its IT across multiple locations, and maintain its records.

It helped them avoid spending tens of thousands on new onsite hardware, reducing their future hardware costs as well.

It also provided them with protection from disasters by:

  • Hosting their business-critical IT assets at a secure, highly-resilient data center in Virginia
  • Replicating their data locally at this facility to enable quick restores (minimum RTO & RPO of 4 hours)
  • Backing up their systems and data to another facility in Dallas, TX, to guarantee against data loss and ensure full restoration

Our cloud CAD solution helped Dant Clayton enhance IT reliability and security by:

  • Providing a highly-resilient infrastructure backed by a 99.999% uptime guarantee
  • Including 24/7/365 monitoring and maintenance by a 22-person Network Operations Center (NOC)
  • Including security measures such as antivirus, firewall, IDS/IPS, anti-DDoS, content filter, DNS filter, and data-at-rest encryption

Said Mathew Harper, Dant Clayton’s VP of Technology: “With IronOrbit’s GPU Cloud desktops, every user now has the power and functionality of a high end CAD station while taking advantage of the latest in Cloud security, accessibility and cost-efficiency. The customizability & scalability of the platform have made it easy for us to add employees & expand as needed, as well as attract & retain the best engineering talent with a work-from-home option.”

Case Study: ICON Builders
Case Study, Manufacturing

ICON Builders, a general contractor, wanted to reduce the time and money that it was spending on managing and maintaining an important application. By signing up with IronOrbit, ICON succeeded in reducing its IT costs and outsourcing the application’s management to a hosting provider it could trust.

The Client

ICON Builders is a general contractor that specializes in the renovation and construction of affordable housing. Since 1984, it has renovated more than 17,000 affordable housing apartment units.

It has completed projects in five different states: Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington. According to its website, the company is currently engaged in nearly a dozen different projects—costing a total of $187.6 million—that involve the renovation or construction of close to 1,200 housing units.

The Problem

ICON Builders contacted IronOrbit because it was unhappy with its current deployment of an application called Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate.

Sage 300 CRE is business management software for enterprises in the construction industry. General contractors like ICON Builders use it to manage and track their finances, store and organize their electronic files, and assign and monitor the progress of project tasks, goals, and schedules.

At a certain point, ICON Builders decided that it was spending too much time and money maintaining its deployment of Sage 300 CRE by itself.

It wanted to redeploy the application with a hosting provider that would not just host the application but also perform all of the maintenance and support tasks that ICON once handled internally.

It was important for the hosting provider to be able to resolve problems with the Sage 300 CRE deployment quickly. It’s also crucial to maintain the availability of the application at all times, since much of the work at ICON involved the application in one way or another.

The Solution

“We moved our Timberline (Sage 300) server to their Hosting service and we have never had a better IT decision.”

In the end, ICON Builders selected IronOrbit, a leading provider of managed hosted IT solutions, to host its Sage 300 CRE deployment.

No other hosting company provides as many advanced IT services with its solutions for no additional cost as IronOrbit. For example, the IT services that came with ICON Builders’s hosted Sage 300 CRE (as they do with all IronOrbit hosted solutions) included:

  • 24x7x365 all-inclusive technical support. All-inclusive meaning that IronOrbit will provide technical support for all of ICON’s networks and IT hardware and software. Not just the hosted Sage 300 CRE
  • 24x7x365 monitoring and maintenance of the Sage 300 CRE deployment and its underlying IT infrastructure
  • An IT security system that protected the Sage 300 CRE deployment from hacking attempts, malware, physical theft. And also from inappropriate access by Ironorbit personnel
  • Complete onsite and offsite backups of all of the data associated with the Sage 300 CRE deployment. Which is performed multiple times daily

World-Class IT Solutions at a Price You Can Afford

ICON Builders only had to pay a low, flat monthly fee. This all-inclusive fee is for the hosted Sage 300 CRE and all of the included IT services.

In addition, no one at the company had to spend any of his or her own time managing the application. Plus, ICON Builderswas able to save itself thousands of dollars by not having to purchase any servers. Which it would need if it planned to host the application onsite.

By signing up for hosted Sage 300 CRE from IronOrbit, ICON Builders achieved its goals of reducing its IT costs and outsourcing the management and support of the application. They achieved that while also ensuring that the application was properly maintained and protected.

The Chief Financial Officer of ICON Builders, Marianne Laupp, summed up how pleased the company was with IronOrbit.

Laupp said, “We have been with IronOrbit for more than a year now. We moved our Timberline (Sage 300) server to their Hosting service and we have never had a better IT decision. The move went very smoothly and we have had very few minor issues since then. Their ticketing process and support is great. They look at a problem and have the ability to fix anything immediately. We are very happy that we moved to their service, it has saved us immeasurable time and money. I would highly recommend their team to anyone looking for a better IT solution.”

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