ABOUT THE TRUSS COMPANY

The Truss Company, a leading manufacturer of engineered wood roof and floor trusses, was founded in 1985. It sells primarily to professional contractors in the residential and commercial construction field. The company operates eight state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities throughout the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Although primarily a manufacturer, the company also reviews blueprints, makes engineering calculations, and assists with project designs.

A NEW CHALLENGE

Fresh on the heels of overcoming the challenge of unifying the company’s CRM and ERP systems, the pandemic lockdown hit on March 23, 2020, and everything changed immediately. Company President Martin D. Waiss, VP Cliff J. Foster, and the rest of the C-level executives called an all-hands meeting to determine what to do next. Everyone was in shock – How could the Governor declare a state of emergency and issue a mandatory stay-at-home order?!
After the initial shock wore off, other questions quickly arose. How will employees work? How can we continue to serve our customers? What about moving supplies? Can we still drive on the roads? The questions came faster than the answers. Although the room was in a panic, Mark Gallant, System Administrator, began to smile because he knew they already had a solution to deal with the problem. Mark made the announcement, “We’re in a hosted environment. Tell everyone to take their computers from the office and go home.”

Who would have known that the solution for a completely unrelated problem – the unification of the organization’s database onto a cloud environment – would save the day when it came time to rethink how the company operates? “I can’t express my gratitude for IronOrbit’s hosted environment. The benefits to our company have been innumerable,” says Mark Gallant. “You can’t even measure what IronOrbit has enabled our company to achieve. A good number of other companies in our industry were completely decimated for
months.” There was a paradigm shift in the company’s view of work structure. This level of flexibility was invaluable and reassured employees of the company’s regard for their quality of life. Leadership also recognized their options, allowing them to repurpose existing office space and lower or eliminate future overhead expenses. They could hire global talent while mitigating immigration issues and benefiting from increased productivity. Workers receive geographic flexibility and an increased sense of work-life balance.

Mark mentions an engineer from East India who went home for two weeks for a family wedding. He took his laptop and participated in an important family event while being able to work remotely. Another engineer lives in Canada and wants to take a few months to travel to Mexico during the summer. He was able to travel, log in at specified times, work effectively, and maintain his schedule.

The benefits of being a part of IronOrbit’s cloud ecosystem don’t stop at the operations level. The entire workforce of the Truss Company enjoys a better work-life and home-life because of the time saved commuting; there’s more time to relax and participate in family experiences. Research has shown that WFH programs increase employee engagement and lower attrition because workers are happier and more productive. The successful transition of the Truss Company shows that even well-established and mature organizations can make dramatic changes quickly. It’s not a question of whether a work-from-anywhere scenario is possible but rather a question of what is needed to make it possible. As the Truss Company discovered, you’ll be ready for anything by modernizing your IT infrastructure.

Mark Gallant,
System Administrator

Because of IronOrbit’s special brand of DaaS, the Truss Company was able to transition from oce to work from home (WFH) while decimated competitors reeled at the outset of the pandemic. “You plan for months and months to get into this solution, and then God created the best problem to show you how beneficial it is.”

THE TRUSS COMPANY SOLUTION

IronOrbit deployed over 170+ Premier INFINITY Workspaces across all of Truss facilities and allocated over 7TB of our INFINITY Data & Back-Up Storage. The Truss company utilizes IronOrbit 2Factor Authentication as an extra security measure to access all of their cloud desktops. IronOrbit Support Services manages multiple O365 Products as well as Truss Companies’ day-to-day
technical needs.

The post The Truss Company Case Study first appeared on IronOrbit.

ABOUT CLIPPER CORPORATION

Since 1994 the Clipper Corporation has been a leading the global distribution of commercial restaurant supplies and uniforms. Built upon a reputation for responsiveness and quality, Clipper has evolved and expanded into a world-class custom manufacturer of products for private and consumer brand labels. Their list of clients reads like the who’s who of popular restaurants and fast-food chains including Denny’s, Darden, Olive Garden, Taco Bell, Burger King, Chili’s, and more. They also supply giants like the Home Depot and Costco.

CHALLENGES & REQUIREMENTS

From the onset, the IT demands on the Clipper Corporation were extreme. They were collecting a great amount of sensitive data from their customers all over the country. They also had huge amounts of accumulating data from their various supply chains as well. Mike Kielty (IT Director) and Nancy Hejran (COO) knew from the beginning that there’d be some of kind disaster or
catastrophe just around the corner. When that day came, they wanted to know their data would be protected. Migrate highly customized services and data from a 3rd party provider (hostile) servicing operations in Atlanta, Georgia and Los Angeles California. Existing Infrastructure was on the premises. There was a localized datacenter on legacy equipment. Customer was in the
middle of a major ERP upgrade during the migration.

CUSTOMER DEPLOYMENT ACHIEVEMENTS & MILESTONES

We successfully transitioned the Clipper Corporation from a localized infrastructure to the IronOrbit cloud. This enabled a more dynamic and agile business workflow. The client benefited from improved employee support. They have been able to respond quickly to shifts and trends in the market as they occur. For example, being agile and responsive to dramatic changes due to the COVID pandemic. Infrastructure: We custom-built a VDI platform based on Citrix technology to meet Clipper’s specific requirements and deployed thin client-based workstations. We migrated users, applications, and data from the traditional IT infrastructure to the new platform without operational disruption.
Email: We migrated Clipper’s existing email infrastructure to a fully managed and fully hosted IronOrbit Exchange solution, with built-in IronOrbit SendSafe email encryption.
Business Continuity, Backup & DR: We designed a business continuity, backup, and disaster recovery strategy. It featured 12 months of retention, daily snapshots, and an encrypted on-site backup solution.

Managed IT: Clipper Corporation outsourced the management of its entire IT infrastructure to IronOrbit. The Company relies on IronOrbit to keep its data safe and secure 24/7 and ensure uptime and availability.

We’ve been able to make decisions and move fast without much effort and without worrying about our IT because we had the infrastructure in place beforehand. We’ve always been cloud-based. And the support has been fantastic! It has given us peace of mind.

Nancy Hejran, COO of Clipper Corporation

DEPLOYMENT SPECIFICS

• Custom-built VDI/thin client solution, with hosted Exchange and hosted DR.
• Critical security & operating system patch management for all desktops and servers.
• Network, firewall, switch, and IDS management across all branches.
• Network antivirus, spyware, and phishing protection against malware threats.
• 24/7 real-time, non-intrusive network and security monitoring and alerting

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SMMA improves workflows and design efficiency while reducing management costs with INFINITY Workspaces SMMA has designed award-winning places to connect, discover, learn, innovate, and achieve since 1955. As one of the country’s leading architectural firms, SMMA balances engineering, interiors, and site design to afford clients the agility of a single source of creative and technical expertise. A shared pursuit of design excellence and social responsibility guides their practice. Recent awards include the IIDA New England Design Award for SMMA’s work on the Waters Corporations IMMERSE Innovation and Research Lab.

SMMA has designed award-winning places to connect, discover, learn, innovate, and achieve since 1955. As one of the country’s leading architectural firms, SMMA balances engineering, interiors, and site design to afford clients the agility of a single source of creative and technical expertise. A shared pursuit of design excellence and social responsibility guides their practice.

Recent awards include the IIDA New England Design Award for SMMA’s work on the Waters Corporations IMMERSE Innovation and Research Lab.

Reasons for INFINITY Workspaces

• Access high-level GPU performance for Enscape & other CAD applications from anywhere on any device.
• Improved performance for Windows 10 & office productivity applications.
• Automatic upgrades & easy maintenance.
• Mitigate lost productivity time resolving IT issues.
• Optimize workflows with unmetered bandwidth for real-time remote file access, editing, and collaboration.
• All-in-One turnkey solution for a predictable monthly fee

The Challenge

Most virtual workstation solutions fail to provide the application performance needed to ensure smooth and productive workflows. IT leadership needed to provide a solution to accommodate graphics-intensive applications’ heavy data and rendering demands.

Summary

• SMMA is a leader in architectural design and construction.
• The AEC firm replaced CAD workstations with IronOrbit’s GPU-accelerated INFINITY Workspaces.
• The cloud environment reduces hardware costs and democratizes existing systems in a hybrid workplace.
• Today, architects, engineers, mechanics, and designers can access all modern graphics-intensive applications, including Revit, Sketch-Up, Enscape 3D, and 3D Studio Max.

The Solution

IronOrbit delivered their GPU-Accelerated INFINITY Workspaces, powered by NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation technology with NVIDIA A40 GPUs, to resolve the problem.
INFINITY Workspaces empower SMMA teams to be Scalable, Collaborative, and Highly Productive in a Cloud Environment.

IronOrbit’s INFINITY Workspaces deliver SMMA designers and engineers secure and reliable access to 2D and 3D models from any location on any device. Architects can view design changes in real-time, and stakeholders can render realistic models to make confident decisions. Remote project teams are able to work effectively with the capacity and speed from IronOrbit’s secure data centers.

NVIDIA RTX Technology

NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations benefit from all of the enhancements of NVIDIA RTX technology, including real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, rasterization, and simulation.
With RTX technology, artists realize the dream of real-time cinematic-quality rendering of photorealistic environments with perfectly accurate shadows, reflections, and refractions so that they can create unique content faster than ever before.

It also brings the power of AI to visual computing to dramatically accelerate creativity for artists and designers by freeing up time and resources through intelligent manipulation of images, automation of repetitive tasks, and optimization of compute-intensive processes.

Programmable shading features enable the creation of richer visuals with more fluid interactivity with large models and scenes and improved VR experiences. RTX technology also enables accurate modeling of the behavior of real-world objects in everything from games to virtual environments and special effects.

INFINITY Titanium Workspaces leverage NVIDIA’s A40 – an evolutionary leap in performance and multi-workload capabilities, combining best-in-class professional graphics with powerful compute and AI acceleration to meet the design, creative, and scientific challenges posed by modern AEC workflows.
INFINITY GPU-Accelerated Workspaces and NVIDIA’s A40 are driving the next generation of cloud workstations for creative and design professionals to work effectively anytime, anywhere, on any device.

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SuitesPro, Commercial Real Estate Firm

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS
Company:

• SuitesPro
• Real-estate leasing (executive suites)
• Environmentally-conscious, fully-integrated IT

IT Needs:

• Flexible and scalable IT infrastructure
• 24/7/365 complete technical support
• Environmentally “green” IT solution
• Fully hosted technology infrastructure

IronOrbit VDI features:

• Low, fixed monthly cost
• Secure virtual desktops
• Fast & easy user experience
• Premier support, 24/7/365

Solution:

 Secure, private cloud desktop infrastructure (VDI – INFINITY Workspaces) backed with 24/7/365 technical support.

SuitesPro builds and leases eco-friendly executive suites to small businesses and independent professionals. Its most recent project was converting a 2,000 sq. ft. complex into 9 beautifully furnished private offices, a conference room, a business lounge, and a copy center. Being the first LEED-certified building in Anaheim Hills, CA, SuitesPro employs natural and solar lighting and intuitively conserves water and electricity. Nearly all of the executive suites have been continually occupied since their construction in 2010.

“Simply move in, and you’re ready for business. IronOrbit has provided everything our tenants need in terms of IT. No headaches, EVER” – Suites Pro Property Manager

CHALLENGES & REQUIREMENTS

SuitesPro’s fundamental concept was to offer fully integrated IT services for their entire Anaheim Hills complex. New tenants could then possess immediate, first-day access to the Internet, data storage, a hosted desktop, and a flexible VoIP telephone system.
SuitesPro’s desired IT infrastructure would need to be capable of quickly and painlessly integrating new users and connections and handling heavy workloads throughout the day.
Instead of a conventional on-site IT infrastructure, SuitesPro decided that it wanted a private, secure, cloud-based infrastructure that met or surpassed certain benchmarks in flexibility, stability, and manageability. They wanted the company that hosted this cloud for them to provide 24/7/365 technical support and to share the same level of commitment to environmentally friendly or “green” business practices.

SuitesPro briefly considered a traditional on-site server and workstation IT infrastructure but decided against it for several reasons:

• The tenants, especially those safeguarding the financial information of their customers, would be uncomfortable sharing server resources with other companies in the suite.
• An on-site infrastructure could not be customized to coincide with the individual needs of separate tenants.
• SuitesPro might get stuck with underused, expensive, energy-consuming hardware.
• Integrating the tenants’ pre-existing devices and hardware with the on-site network could be difficult.
• SuitesPro would not be able to fix any IT problems itself and would be required to consult a professional IT services provide.
• Continually replacing and maintaining inefficient hardware clashed with SuitesPro’s environmentally friendly philosophy.

THE SOLUTION
IronOrbit fulfilled SuitesPro’s unique IT requirements by providing a complete, customized virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI). Virtualized desktops have the same appearance and capabilities as a standard workstation but are available from anywhere in the world. Unlike a conventional “standard” desktop, these desktops are professionally managed, maintained, and backed up to ensure maximum business efficiency for their users.
A virtual desktop is accessible to its owner from any web-enabled device. The IronOrbit VDI solution for SuitesPro eliminates the need for on-site hardware or IT management. IronOrbit’s desktop virtualization increases efficiency, reduces costs, and improves data security. VDI powered by IronOrbit enabled SuitesPro to:

• Be the only provider of fully IT-integrated office suites that encompass data, telephone, and technical support requirements.
• Scale up or scale down its infrastructure according to the exact amount of users, connections, and storage required for each tenant.

CASE ACHIEVEMENTS
With LEED-certified construction processes, SuitesPro reduced its energy usage by 27%, its water usage by 48%, and construction material waste by 90%. It added an additional 30-77% reduction in energy consumption by selecting IronOrbit’s hosted solutions over an on-site IT infrastructure.

IronOrbit’s virtualized desktops (INFINITY Workspaces) also provided day-one integrated IT services to all of SuitesPro’s tenants. IronOrbit relieved SuitesPro from large capital expenditures on desktops, servers, and networking equipment, unpredictable IT costs, and the headaches of managing and supporting all of the systems involved.
All at once, SuitesPro achieved greater IT efficiency, lowered its expenses, and maintained its status as an elite provider of environmentally friendly executive suites. The synergy between IronOrbit and SuitesPro clearly demonstrates that going “green” doesn’t have to involve sliding into the red.

The post SuitesPro first appeared on IronOrbit.

Case Study

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.”

The post Case Study: Dant Clayton first appeared on IronOrbit.

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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