Engineering Firm Thrasher Group Selects Scale Computing and Brocade

The Thrasher Group, Inc., a civil engineering firm specialising in public infrastructure, has expanded its hyper-converged storage, server, and virtualisation environment with Scale Computing, Inc. and Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., enabling Thrasher to meet growing data and network demands of complex applications without a complex remodel.

The Scale Computing’s HC3 platform from  along with a Brocade-powered network, formed the foundation of an expanded infrastructure capable of handling increased data volumes from aerial and drone mapping, CAD files, video, renderings, and other vital applications.

Founded in 1983 as a civil engineering firm focused on public utility infrastructure, Thrasher has grown into a multi-disciplinary engineering, architecture, and survey firm. Its projects include critical water, sewer, roadways, bridges and airports, master planning, landscape architecture, and more, for public and more private clients such as electricity, fibre, oil and gas companies.

Scale Computing, a member of the storage and hyper-converged alliance within Brocade’s Strategic Collaboration Program, was Thrasher’s incumbent vendor.

IT manager Brad Fortney knew he could build on his existing Scale hyper-converged platform and refresh the network to support exponential growth. Thrasher deployed Brocade VDX data centre switches and Brocade Ruckus ICX campus switches to provide networking between the hyper-converged platforms. This accelerated application performance for engineers, reducing the time to load a large CAD file from 30 to 40s to less than 10s. Thrasher continues to add HC3 nodes and has over 20 nodes in production to handle the demanding environment. Both sites support just under 100TB of data, and business applications such as email, accounting, printing, CAD, and telephony. Using Brocade Network Advisor, Fortney has an end-to-end view of everything, including the state of the network’s health. Real-time replication means production can fail over to the secondary site at the touch of a button with no user impact.

“Thrasher’s goal is to be a one-stop shop for clients. When clients ask for a new service, we want to respond quickly,” said Fortney. “That’s why we need agile, scalable IT solutions, which the Brocade and Scale Computing products have given us.“

Between Fortney and one other employee on help desk duty, the IT team of two can support 280 employees at multiple locations.

“We can manage this infrastructure because it doesn’t need care and feeding every day,” said Fortney. “It’s performing great. When I asked users how things were going, they said ‘this is awesome, this is fast.’ The engineers love it.”

“For hyper-converged systems to meet the performance and availability demands of mission-critical applications, networking must be an integral part of the design,” said Andrew Coward, VP of strategy, Brocade. “With Brocade and Scale Computing, Thrasher Engineering has an agile and scalable IT infrastructure that allows them to quickly add new services to meet these high demands.“

HC3platform brings storage, servers, virtualisation and management together in a single system. With no virtualisation software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. They make the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.

“Thrasher Group was already a winning case study for the benefits of hyper-convergence via HC3, but with their rapid expansion and the need for additional infrastructure, they’re showing how simple, scalable, and flexible it is as a company grows,” said Jeff Ready, CEO, and co-founder, Scale Computing. “We appreciate being able to collaborate on this project with Brocade, who have provided Thrasher with outstanding network performance to support its superior hyper-convergence.“

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