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The Challenge.
PHR+A is a multi-disciplinary design firm offering extensive engineering and land development services to the private and public sector —not unlike what you may expect to find at mid-sized firms from all across the country. What is unique, however, is the approach that PHR+A has taken to optimize their human capital among thirteen dispersed locations. For example, to meet increasing project demands at their D.C.-area office, where the cost of living is nearly double that of the surrounding cities, PHR+A sought to maximize their resources in their Allentown, PA office, where labor costs and living costs are considerably lower.
In fact, with the exception of short-term projects like simple ALTA and boundary surveys, PHR+A primarily operates in collaboration by sharing their workload across geographic separations as they see fit to utilize their staff most efficiently. Project teams are rarely restricted to just one branch office or city. Their method relies heavily on the continual success of IT solutions that make such project access and collaboration possible. And nobody is more aware of this reliance than Mark Harris, one of their IT support staff.
In Search of a Solution.
“The engineers usually aren’t aware of IT until there’s a problem,” Mark said with a chuckle. Mark has been evaluating various methods to support the company’s ambitious multi-location strategy for years. “We looked at GlobalSCAPE several years ago, but it almost looked too simple,” Mark explained.
Instead, Mark first implemented a Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows® 2000. With projects averaging 30-40 GB of data each, the DFS approach was unable to keep up. “With Windows 2000, DFS uses the CIFS protocol, not byte-level differencing, so a 50 MB file has to transmit 50 MB of data to synchronize. Whole projects could take two or three weeks to transfer,” Mark explained. In an effort to improve transfer speeds, Mark also briefly examined a WAN-acceleration appliance solution, but discovered that it, too, would require large amounts of cache and would increase technology costs significantly in order to operate. Further, users would still have wait times to access key project and work files.
Today, most of PHR+A’s collaboration is facilitated by simple FTP transfers combined with a thick standards document to manually maintain file coherence. There is no file locking, so deviation from policy can mean costly re-work. But, what concerns Mark most is the duplication of data that pollutes his storage space and back-ups. He explained, “Every local server has a ‘download’ folder and an ‘upload’ folder. Within those folders we find multiple versions of each file. So, we are doubling, and often quadrupling the amount of storage required for a single drawing or project file.” Although the overall cost of storage is decreasing in today’s market, the IT costs of managing and backing-up excess data can be high.
For PHR+A, where project collaboration is more than a luxury, but rather a critical business function, there is little opportunity to test new solutions in a working environment. But in January 2007, Mark got a chance to try something new. PHR+A acquired a small company in Newport News, VA, where they would be collaborating almost exclusively with the existing Virginia Beach location. Nearly three years after Mark first reviewed GlobalSCAPE as a possible solution, he decided to use this opportunity to implement it. Mark asked management if he could pilot the software in Newport News, and permission was granted.
The Solution.
“I couldn’t believe how easy GlobalSCAPE WAFS was to install,” Mark said, “A server component, a client component, and it’s up and running.” In no time at all, the installation and configuration was complete and the servers were synchronizing. Also, there was virtually zero footprint of the program itself. “I’m accustomed to software programs like Symantec and SQL that demand significant server resources,” Mark explained, “but GlobalSCAPE is completely different.” The ability for PHR+A to use pre-existing server infrastructure added significantly to the cost justification of the project.
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