Project Profile
Peer Software Solution
- PeerGFS
Customer's Platform(s)
- Windows Storage
Locations
- United Kingdom
- Poland
- Philippines
Industry
- Manufacturing
Applications
- Autodesk AutoCAD
- Autodesk Revit
- Microsoft Office
- Dassault Systèmes CATIA
The Company
The Keystone Group is the UK’s largest steel lintel manufacturer and Europe’s fastest growing roof window manufacturer.
The company has a strong focus on innovation and has established a reputation as a reliable supplier of quality specialist products. With production facilities in the UK and Poland, plus a remote site in the Philippines, Keystone has over 1,000 employees and continuously grows and develops its extensive product offering.
It is part of the Keystone Group which also includes IG Lintels, Keylite Roof Windows, IG Elements, IG Masonry Support Systems and Smartroof.
The Challenge
Keystone Lintels’ distributed workforce relies on a wide area network for seamless access to critical services. The decision to adopt PeerGFS was driven by the need to upgrade the company’s legacy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for engineers.
Keystone Lintels wanted to give every engineer access to more effective workstations, with better responsiveness and performance. An added challenge was that user files were stored centrally and could be slow to access which impacted on productivity.
Solution
Keystone Lintels implemented PeerGFS to provide local file access of global data to engineers in remote sites such as Swadlincote and Cwmbran.
The ability to efficiently replicate data and prevent version conflicts through integrated file locking across mirrored sites became a key selling point for PeerGFS, as it ensured seamless collaboration among users working on the same projects, simultaneously.
Results
Since implementation in 2018, the Keystone Group has benefited from:
- Increased productivity: opening up colleague collaboration with real-time file synchronisation across remote sites
- Flexibility: to easily decommission legacy infrastructure without losing data
- Continuous availability: protecting users against downtime, ensuring users remain connected to documents, data files and business applications, and reducing the risk of data loss
- Substantial cost savings: retiring its legacy desktop infrastructure saved budget on licensing and infrastructure support
We wanted to put effective workstations in front of every engineer and allow them to work with better responsiveness and performance. It has enabled us to have a business that can work from a very remote site in the Philippines. We were able to deploy our remote file server there and use Peer Software to synchronise the data, allowing our team to work effectively anywhere.
