TRUSSWORKS ELEVATES THEIR INFRASTRUCTURE WITH TRUENAS

Introduction

Trussworks LLC and its sibling Axis Truss Design serve individuals, general contractors and builders in the construction industry. The companies fabricate products in Texas and design them in Michigan. As with many vendors in their industry, advancing IT infrastructure and practices became a pressing challenge for their technical staff.

The Storage Challenge

Trussworks was looking to replace an aging peer-to-peer network that had consistent performance issues supporting its specialized engineering applications. The biggest challenge Trussworks faced was that its database couldn’t share data and files across multiple locations due to limitations of outdated infrastructure. The company needs a single source of truth with exceptional performance across multiple geographies to support its operating model. The company investigated cloud-based storage solutions, but these proved unsuitable as they didn’t lend themselves to the workflow and suffered performance bottlenecks. After testing various solutions, Trussworks selected TrueNAS Enterprise.

Requirements

• Enhanced performance and mobility to migrate, sync, and archive data while delivering noticeably faster file access and sharing across multiple geographies.
• Flexibility to adapt and change with minimal strain to scale capacity to meet today’s requirement while providing for future growth.
• Choice to leverage the right platform and technologies that best meets the need.
• Solid reliability that ensures data accessibility for all participating studios, publications and team members regardless of time or location.

TrueNAS Benefits

• Data Mobility that delivers high-performance file access and sharing across multiple sites.
• Flexibility to support a variety of applications, including virtualization.
• Choice to leverage the right platform and technologies that best meets the needs while seamlessly integrating with existing IT infrastructure.
• Access to industry-leading 24/7 support.
• In other words, True Data Freedom.

TRUENAS ADVANTAGES

Given a recommendation to explore TrueNAS and its experience testing alternative solutions, Trussworks’ decision came down to which technical choice best fit its need. After considering all the options, the company knew a turnkey approach combining storage and servers was the way to go. This solution, TrueNAS Enterprise, eliminated much of the integration challenge organizations face when deploying new gear. Since upgrading to TrueNAS Enterprise, The IT Team at Trussworks was shocked to experience the incredible speed and performance compared with their previous network infrastructure. Moving files between three geographically distributed locations became fast and easy and now supports company-wide virtualization on a single storage array.

Trussworks deployed a TrueNAS Enterprise X20 high availability at one of their manufacturing facilities, while other locations received single-controller TrueNAS Enterprise X10S to support the more modest client-side requirements. Performance is not an issue for the 25-30 employees accessing data and productivity has increased by many factors. This is despite the non-optimized single-threaded legacy engineering application Trussworks deploys on these TrueNAS Enterprise arrays. With TrueNAS Enterprise, Trussworks enjoys the mobility, choice, and flexibility that True Data Freedom offers.

“TrueNAS has the flexibility of a unified high-performance platform that meets all storage needs, while providing enterprise-class service and support from the TrueNAS Community and iXsystems.” – Greg Bilby, IT Manager, Trussworks LLC

Results

Greg highlighted the partnership and ease of working together when Trussworks suffered a significant power surge that damaged one of its TrueNAS systems. Trussworks was surprised by how iXsystems’ Support Engineers listened and didn’t ask silly questions such as “are you sure you rebooted?” Instead, Greg was escalated immediately to a Tier 3 Technician, who helped diagnose the issue and promptly dispatched a new backup controller.

Trussworks stated that getting a proper hardware quote upfront was essential as there was no appetite for going back and forth with a sales representative who didn’t understand its needs. Mr. Bilby expressed his comfort in knowing that iXsystems is a leader in open-source storage software and was happy to support a company that shared his ideals.

iXsystems treats our customers like family and our support team as an extension of their organizations. We are pleased to know that Trussworks chose TrueNAS Enterprise and will look to TrueNAS again to meet their future needs.