Sherwood Construction
Who is Sherwood Construction?
Today, heavy grading projects continue to be the primary focus of Sherwood’s work. With over 70 years’ experience, Sherwood Construction is highly respected as a leader within the industry. From the generation of technical drawings to the management of a $100 million fleet of heavy equipment, Sherwood has the capability to handle virtually any civil construction project.
Customer Pain
Sherwood Construction has grown to 400 network users across 8 total offices, and is still growing. Lack of standardization between the multiple locations made remote support very complicated, so the Sherwood IT support team, of 2.5 employees, spent a good deal of time traveling to correct backup and connectivity issues. The pain of being spread too thin was becoming more apparent every day. Also, Sherwood does large state projects on a bid basis, so they recently invested in a new software program that helps automate the bid process. The new LOB software makes up-time even more critical than in the past and they needed the infrastructure to support the new software.
Assessment
After discussing all of the issues and Sherwood’s growth plan for the future, it was determined that server and license consolidation, high availability, failover, disaster recovery, and business continuity solutions would best solve all of these issues.
Solution & Implementation
We compared Microsoft licensing options and decided that Open Value was the best fit. To consolidate the servers, we deployed HP rack mount servers in two different cities. One city is the main datacenter and the other is the disaster recovery site. We configured virtual servers within those environments using Microsoft Hyper-V. With a combination of SonicWall High Availability NSA appliances, HP ProCurve switches, HP LeftHand SAN, and HP servers we designed an infrastructure where any failure or interruption has a failover to another device or site. Each component can be managed remotely, using Microsoft System Center Suite.
Customer Impact
The internal IT team can now focus on end user support services. One member of the team has been reassigned to do application development, using their new LOB software. He now has time to fully implement and enhance the software products they own. A second person on the team is devoted to help desk services, rather than putting out fires on the network. The infrastructure improvements will translate to nearly 100% up-time and with the enhanced stability of their network and bid processes, Sherwood will now see both a higher profit and an increased ROI.