Name: Nasuni for AEC: Designing with Data Innovation
Uploaded: 2024-12-06T17:14:59.989Z
Duration: 45 min 44 s
Description: Nasuni for AEC: Designing with Data Innovation

Transcript for "Nasuni for AEC: Designing with Data Innovation": Okay. Alright. Hello, everyone. I know I can still see that there's a number of folks, coming in. We'll get started here in just a few minutes. Thank you for that, Kenzie. And, welcome. We're really glad that you could come. Hello, Ned, from Virginia. I'm in Boston today. And, today, we are joined by a couple of Nasuni customers. We're joined by Charles Douglas from McKim and Creed as the director of IT there. Welcome, Charles. And Brian Hynek, who's the director of IT at Civil and Environmental Consultants. Both of these gentlemen have been using the SUNY in the AEC space, and we wanted to take advantage of this time to be able to to learn from their experiences and, get some of their input and insight into what works best and and, some of the best practices and experiences that they've had. So we'll spend some time with Charles and Brian here, as we, as we move through the program today. Alright. Welcome, everybody. People are still coming in. Fabulous. Let's go ahead and get started here. So, the the first thing I wanna just say here is, you know, obviously as the from the Nasuni perspective, we have been supporting AEC firms now for over a decade, actually. And a, a a large, as you can see, a large number of firms over 250 leading AEC firms are using Nasuni. And I think as we go through our conversation today, you're gonna see why that we've we've been so successful in that space and what and why we stay focused on this space and continue to innovate and invest in in supporting the needs of our AEC customers. There's one of the interesting stats across the bottom around, you know, the number of hosted design files, 66 petabytes, managed in the SUNY, and, you know, 706,000,000 snapshots for rapid file recovery. That's a that's a few. And, you know, 55100 combined global offices and job sites spread all over the world. It's been it's a it's a it's a testament to the success of these firms, and and we are happy to support them, all of you, and, in this effort. Pleased to be doing that. I wanna I wanna take a a a couple minutes and just sort of acknowledge some of the the challenges that that you all face, and, and and we'll see if you agree. You might have you probably have your own challenges, but, you know, this, there's a lot here. But, you know, to really kinda nail it down, you know, AEC has some unique challenges in that sector because you're dealing with exceptionally large file sizes, you have complex design files, 3 d files, and trying to make sure that you can collaborate on those in across the spirit systems and organizations and different regions is is for many companies a huge challenge. It's something that we certainly address with the SUNY. The other, you know, the other thing is, you know, things happen. Right? Versioning, being able to quickly recover a file when something goes awry, which, you know, unfortunately does. You have humans involved. Things get things can happen. Getting that done quickly and and the speed involved there is is critical for to keep things moving. It's always a challenge for firms. And, you know, and just being able to move away from traditional file storage. You know, there's many of you might may may already be on that on that path. Certainly, Charles and Brian are are have have made that jump to modernize how you deal with data and and the synchronization that has to occur. But taking advantage of the cloud and moving off legacy NAS systems is is critical to that, and that's a a challenge that this exists outside, you know, for for all AEC firms and for for many anyway that are, you know, that are considering how do I improve my business process and how do I make things go faster? And, you know, speed is always of the essence. You know, something that I I talk about a little bit later is just incorporating new datasets when you have an acquisition or you're you're you're, you know, taking on another project that involves another firm or whatever the case may be where you need to integrate data quickly and and and make it available to all the necessary teams. And, you know, I'll skip some of these, but the the cost management, at the end of the day, you know, the the the return on investment and the, you know, the the the costs associated with managing storage, anything we can do to lower that cost and take advantage of technology, like Nasuni to be able to do that is is a huge win and but that remains a challenge for many firms out there. So, you know, I I we we did some research on sort of what are the what are the trends that are emerging. You know, at this time of year, right, everyone's talks about the trends for 2025 and and AEC is no different. And there's, you know, there's a couple of trends that have emerged that have been published by, you know, I gathered this information from Deloitte and other sources, but it's, you know, the the trend is to to see an increased adoption of cloud solutions for a lot of the reasons we just talked about on the challenge side, that there's there's good reason to do that and and good reason to improve the way you're managing complex, data. AI I mean, of course, AI is everywhere. We're we're we're all dealing with it or considering it. Where would it where will it play in our organization? Where where can I take advantage of it to maximum effect? And, so, you know, the predictions in this for this year are that certainly that will continue to be the case and and and it will more likely be leveraged in decision making, with, you know, predictive analysis, helping you guide, you know, where resources need to be, automating document categorization, tagging, extracting data insights from the existing datasets, all all things of that nature. And then I think, you know, personally, I think, every year the security will be a trend because the security world is always evolving, threats are always evolving, and, you know, ensuring data security is is always top priority. So that I think that's something that's not surprising to see on this list, and certainly something to consider. And another reason that a lot of firms are reconsidering how they manage their data and how they take advantage of the cloud. So those are some some of the the the state of the market, the state of the world. I think you, hopefully, you agree with some of these or maybe you probably have some of your own. Like I said, there's there's certainly others. But, I wanna take the time now to, move into a conversation with Brian and Charles. And and, and I thought we'd start out today by, you know, doing a little bit of an introduction by way of sharing each of you, please kinda share an overview of your environment, and and about your about your business, about your company. So, let's go alphabetical. Brian, we'll start with you. Sure. I'm Brian Hynek. I've been with Civil and Environmental Consultants for about 31 years. I started off as a CAD guy and, basically grew my way into the IT director for the company. We are a multi disciplined engineering firm. We do basically everything a we have offices in about 30 1 or 32 different cities across the United States. I believe I have about 36 filers. So I have some volume managers and other locations with them. I believe we have approximately 275 terabytes of data in the SUNY file structure and everything we have generated since 1992 is up in the SUNY. We've never deleted anything. All of that data is sitting up in there. Other than that, that's basically our what we have going on with the SUNY. Excellent. Excellent. So my name is Charles Douglas, and I'm the IT director, of McKim and Crete. We're primarily based in the southeastern United States, focusing on surveying as well as civil engineering. We do pretty much, like Brian, everything in the AEC space. Right now, we've got about 900 employees. We've got someplace between 21 and 23 filers, as we're kind of moving around and have been opening a bunch of offices recently. We have about a 150 terabytes up inside of our Nasuni environment since we put it in 5 years ago, and it's been really, really running well for us. Yeah. We do we have 1600 employees too, so that that actually was one of the things that I had, you know, issue with whenever we were looking at, the file structure that we were going with. I had trouble finding, you know, vendors that had a large number of employees and a large footprint, so that's why we selected Nasuni. Interesting. Yeah. Good good to hear. Thank you both. I will I do wanna take a moment to pause and, point out to all all everyone attending today that there is a opportunity for you to ask questions. On the right side of the screen where there you'll see a chat, a messages tab, and a q and a tab. And if you click on the q and a tab, you can post your questions there. If we have the opportunity to answer them in in the course of our discussion, we will. Otherwise, we're allowed time at the end for some q and a. So please, as you think of things, go ahead and just post them right there in the q and a tab. Okay. Thank you both. So, I'm gonna start out with a question for for you, Charles. Let's start with you about sort of, you know, what what what motivated you? Where were you at, when you said, man, we gotta we gotta change things? What were the challenges you were facing prior to Nasuni, and what drove you that way? So the first thing that started with us from a business perspective is we wanted to make sure that every one of our team members could access whatever information they needed securely from anywhere at any time. And when we have that idea, we started looking at our current structure, which had individual file servers and individual offices, and we realized that that was not going to be able to get the job done. If you needed to find a project, you had to know where the project started, and then everyone here, if you're in AEC space, you know how much fun Civil 3 d loves running across wide area network links. So it really just wasn't going to be able to get the job done. And that's when we started looking for a cloud based centralized solution that would allow multiple users to work on the same project across different offices. Right. Right. Yep. And a classy example of very large and very complex files that just don't lend themselves. That don't do well with latency. They do not. Not at all. Alright. Thanks, Charles. Hey, Brian. Same question for you. Kinda what what drove you to reconsider your your your environment and and move towards Nasuni? Well, honestly, it's identical. Charles hit the nail on the head with exactly the same reason. The same thing we were trying to do whenever we first started looking at this. We were looking, you know, first of all, how can we work more collaboratively in all of these sites and all these locations and make it easier for our employees to find what they need? We had the same exact issue, you know, except with 20 at that point in time, I believe we had 22 followers or 22 sites, and it was just becoming unmanageable to try and, you know, get these servers in, get all the data on there, then let alone you might have somebody working from 3 different sites on the same project, and you're unable to just manage and navigate that amount of data. So we were in the same boat. We ended up, you know, just looking at a couple different vendors to try and fit the bill for this. And, you know, that's when we selected Nasuni. Actually, we download a couple different things and it was definitely top of the line for us. Right. Right. Well, that's good to hear. You know, the the the large file I will kinda comment on this. The large workload issue is not well, I think it's very prevalent in AEC for the nature of the of the business, the nature of the data sources, but it is not it's not solely, dedicated AC. I know we see a lot of the same challenges being addressed in, you know, places like health care with large DICOM images. Anything that requires large files and sharing sort of requires an architecture that can support that properly and and, and keep people on the same page. So it's it's interesting. You know, Brian, you made you you just said, you know, you looked at other solutions, which leads me to my next question. Thank you very much. What other I'm kinda curious. What other tools, did you consider when when you're before you looked at Nasuni? We looked at, Panzura and we looked at Ignite. And whenever I looked at them that that's the reason why I don't mind doing this whenever, anybody asks me because whenever we were looking I'm gonna say it's probably 6 years ago that we went with Nasuni. Actually, it was 6 years ago. And, I had a lot of trouble finding good references for all of these products. And I'm like, all these people were, like, just holding their cards to their vest and not really telling you what they were doing. So one of the things that we, you know, we looked at Panzura and Ignite. And Panzura, I could not find a customer of theirs that had more than 6 or 7 sites. So and they were saying, yeah. We have big we have big companies. We have big products. We have big, sites deal. Is this something? Yeah. They couldn't give me a reference for 1. So and I have trouble finding references for Ignite too as well. So I but I did speak to some people on them and whenever I actually met with the, founder of Nasuni and, you know, he was saying about how he originally started this out in the media business to on how to deal with the large videos and stuff like that. And he's like, I love the ABC space because it's just your challenges are so unique, and it was pretty cool to hear that he was interested in it. But, yeah, that was kind of what we did. We, we looked at Panzura, Ignite, and again, I figured my deciding factor, honestly, before we went with the proof of concept was, what other big firms were running this. Big firms that do the same things I do. So how if it's good enough to work for a AECOM or Kinley Horn with 33,000 employees, hey, it's gotta work for us. So that was one of the issues that I decided, you know, on the SUNY. Right. Right. No. Thank you, Brian. Charles, how about how about you? We also looked at Panzura, and then we also looked at another file replication piece of software that was from Pure Software. And we did we didn't look at Ignite because at the point in time when we were evaluating, Ignite really didn't have the global file locking that we were looking to be able to do. We, you know, talked with a bunch of other firms about it, but didn't have one that could handle the data and the variety of data. One of our challenges is that we not only use Autodesk tools, but we also use Bentley tools. And so it's like you can't just have us you have to have a solution that has some independence, and then also our back end functions. Like, this is great for sharing files even if it's a PDF file for our accounting teams or with our marketing teams when they're sharing those InDesign files. So we needed to find a solution that could handle a variety of project sizes, file sizes, and file types, and the SINI was the best solution to that. Yeah. Yeah. That that that that's that's an excellent point. Thank you. I mean, there's a use there's a large variety of files in in, and in the AE sleep space in particular. You know, in other sectors that we deal with, you know, everyone has Office. There's Acrobat. You know, there's some there's some creative suite. Right? In this space, it's a large number of applications, and a wide variety. I mean, and, you know, talking with you and talking with other AEC customers, you you run a lot of them. Yeah. You it's like, well, what tools do you use? You know, all of them. Right? It's a long variety long list. Like, okay. But you've gotta be able to service those service those applications and and, and meet the needs for any given project. Right? So, so alright. Well, that's good to know. You know, I think, there's some I think also that, you know, there's there's a lot of architectural you you mentioned, you know, the global file locking, and the and the and the art underlying architecture. I think that's you know, I know I'm biased. I I admit it. I get it. But, it makes a huge difference, when you start thinking about how am I gonna satisfy the needs of 30 different offices scattered around the country or the world. Alright. Well, I'm gonna move on to the next question now. Brian, we'll start with you. One point about that. You know, with the file locking, what the other deciding factors for us not going with Panzura is if you look at what they do, their files have to their filers all tell every other filer what file is locked. So even if that filer has no intention whatsoever opening that file, nobody in that site is gonna open it. They're telling it, hey, this file is locked. So it's a lot of chatter and that's why I don't believe it would have worked for an office like ours with 20 some sites at that point in time. Right. So that was one of the other things. With with Nasuni, it whenever you go to open the file, it goes up and checks to see if that file is locked. It doesn't proactively say, hey. This file is locked. It's like a lot of backscatter, back chatter that you don't need to be dealing with. Yeah. I think, you know, Brian, you're hitting on something that's sort of fundamental is that, you know, kinda starting with the architecture is that it's some of these tools like Ignite and, you know, Panzura, you know, they do well with a couple offices. They could you could get by with a couple offices. In smaller deployments. It's when you grow and you start in in in which I'm sure every business who wants to grow that you start running into a challenge with with some of that. So excellent point. Thank you. Alright. Next up on our our Jeopardy questions here. So, Brian, I'll start with you. We'll keep going here. What are the, you know, what are some of the key benefits that you've realized? You know, you moved to Nasuni. You know, you did POC. There were things that drew you in, but what what are some of the now that you've been using it for a while, what would you say are the the key benefits that your company has realized? Our key benefit is number 1, collaboration. I mean, it's unmatched with what we were doing before. We don't care where a project is. We don't care who's working on it. It just you stop caring about a lot of things. And if you're good in the sun, you honestly, it's like, you know, I don't care about our acquisitions. I don't care, like, that these companies I just bought out 40 terabytes of data. So what? I drag it in. I bring it into my system and, it just ingest it and we work on it like it's no no business of anybody. Right? So, you know, my main key best, benefit was collaboration, the resiliency of the file system. I don't have to worry about ransomware anymore. I can roll back any file to any version at any point in time. Going back to 2018 when I first put this system in is pretty impressive. Those are my biggest key benefits. And cost savings, it's really hard to tell what the actual savings is because you're you have an expense with Microsoft or Azure just or, AWS because you're storing the data, which is isn't necessarily cheap. You do pay Nasuni for stuff, but your filers are cheaper. And there's a lot of other, you know, things like that that ends up I I still believe Nasuni is probably saving us money, but I can't really prove it. But aside from the other things that we get out of it, the savings is is just gravy, you know. Our employees are just absolutely loving it. It's one of the best things we've actually implemented. Thank you, Brian. Charles, what what what's been your experience? So the I'm gonna talk about the unexpected benefit. So Nasuni did what they said that they were going to do from a file locking and a file sharing perspective, and they really were very collaborative with us in getting the software implemented. But the best part that we found was the the recovery file, the ability to recover particular files from particular points in time. Because we take a ton of snapshots, and anybody on our IT team can be able to recover a file. There's no mounting tape. There's no getting anything from there. We just have that file, and then you can recover it. And so if a end user has a file that's corrupted, you know, we can recover it from 3 o'clock. And if that doesn't work, we'll back up another hour and recover it from 2 o'clock. And if that doesn't work, we'll back up another hour and recover it from 1 o'clock until we find a really good spot. So we're able to save our surveyors and engineers' design time if a file does get sideways because we can really easily go back to that point. And the ease of doing it, from using a more complex system that we were using Avamar to back everything up, just the ease of being able to do this was was really a surprise inside the Nasuni environment. Yeah. And it blows somebody's minds whenever you actually tell them, well, what what time do you want the file from? It's not what day do you want the file from. It's for what time? When do you think you saved that and you go back and you look and you can find it? Right. Right. It's, you know, it that's one of those things. It's an architectural difference that you, you know, you don't maybe initially think about. But, like, boy, it sure pays dividends when, somebody calls in a panic and says, I need to find my bot. You know? Okay. Hang on a second. I'll get that for you. And plus users would also end up backing up files on their own because they were worried about something being corrupted or something like that. So they'd have, like, a void for it and they start dragging giant files into it. You have multiple copies of the same exact file. Now they don't have to do that. They just they know we can get it for them. Right. Right. And, yeah. Anytime you can eliminate redundancy like that, whether it's just even a personal local store or, you know, somebody setting up another silo because they're you know, they wanna make sure they have separate and now you've got 2 copies of the files. That's just not efficient, and you run the risk, of course, of using the wrong version or who knows what getting you know, they they tend once they fork, they tend to stay for it. So, alright. Appreciate that. You know, I actually kinda brings up a side question, gentlemen. The, you know, you didn't talk about backup and recovery. A lot of our customers, have when they when they moved to Nasuni, they they also got rid of their file backup and recovery solution because they didn't need it anymore. Did did you experience that or did you choose to keep it? We got rid of it. Got rid of it? Yeah. Got rid of it. Yeah. That that's that's the that's the that's the reaction from most folks. And there's some by the way, there's some cost savings for you, Brian. Yeah. And we and we and we also get, you know, a lot of questions like, from people. How often you test or restore routines? Like, well, pretty much daily. Right? You get to you're trying to fill out a 3rd party questionnaire. It's like, well, somebody always does something stupid, delete something, and or a file gets corrupted. We literally restore every single day. Yep. Yep. But, hey, you know, when it's easy to do, it's not a it's not a headache. So you know what? Justin Thomas, thank you for the question, Justin. He posted something in the q and a. He said, okay. So you both are several several years in with Nasuni. Have you looked at other vendors to confirm your choice? Interesting question. Yeah. We have Not really because it's not broke. Don't try and fix it. And I'm just insanely happy with it. It's like if if I look at something whenever there's really a problem to deal with, I don't think I would have a better benefit from anything that's out there right now. So I have not even even thought about doing it. We just actually renewed for another 5 years. I'm not trying to plant a seed, by the way. We love you as a customer. Yeah. It's just I I think that it's, you know, it's been so reliable and so easy. Just I I have not even decided to even try and look at anything. Yeah. Well, we're we're glad for that and we strive for that exact same that exact experience. You know, conversely, we do see a lot of customers that do will jump to Nasuni because they are having a bad experience. So I know that that when things go wrong or, you know, whether it's a ransomware attack or just, you know, a terrible tech support or, just a bad architecture, whatever the case may be. Right? Just when something goes like that, that that you're like, you know what? There's gotta be a better way. Right? And so, that that Lance, we actually did it slightly different. I have taken a look at a couple of other vendors just to see if there was a feature or a reason or something compelling to go from Nasuni. We haven't gotten, like, really, really deep into it, but we have made sure that we understand kind of what's out there in the marketplace, and we still think that Nasuni is the best platform. Yep. And and, and I'll you know, thank you for that. I I, I do have a slide at the end to kinda show where continuing innovations can things that you know, we keep on working on our products to make sure that, you know, as as needs evolve and things change that we're we're staying ahead of it and make sure we support customers like yourselves. So I'll I'll talk I'll touch on that a little bit later. Let's, let's let's jump a bit and talk about some of the business impacts if if we could. You know, you're dealing with comp large complex projects, lots of people involved. Can you give, each of us can each of you, kinda give us some highlights about how that has improved, hopefully improved your, processes and and business efficiency. Charles, maybe I'll ask you to start, please. The biggest thing that it has done is helped us improve our utilization because we can find an underutilized resources anywhere in our footprint And because we're, you know, really working hard on CAD standards so that anybody can work on any project, and the SUNY makes it so that they can pick up that particular project, contribute to it, and then move on to the next one without regard of whether the project's coming from North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, or wherever it happens to be. That's probably the biggest benefit Nasuni has is really letting us share work across our entire platform. Yeah. I'm gonna say the same exact thing because, you know, I've mentioned this in other meetings with people where whenever we first initiated Nasuni, I was, you know, slowly rolling it in as hardware aged out. So I did so I could leverage the, expenditure of the existing hardware. And there were several sites where I had to go through and put Nasuni in way earlier simply because it was so usable for them to keep people from traveling all over the country to work on projects. We had one project where I was shipping people from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Saint Louis to Phoenix to work on the project because that's where the data was. So not only were we paying to fly these people out there, they had to stay away from their families, they had to stay in hotels, eat meals out. I actually put Nasuni you know, if that giant project kicked off right as we were doing our proof of concept, and right as soon as we signed on, I replaced all of those sites filer with Nasuni filers. All those people no longer went to Phoenix anymore and just went home and actually worked from their house or from their office and didn't have to mess with it. Yeah. Yeah. That that's, you know, it's, you know, listen. I it's cold and and really and freezing here in Boston, but Phoenix sounds kinda good right now. But, yeah, after after about a week in a hotel, it's like, alright. That's great. I'd I'd much rather be home. Yep. Well, it's February too. There you go. Alright. I'm cognizant of time here. I've got a couple other questions for you, but we might we might, actually, I think we might have talked about this already. But if you have you know, we talked about scenarios with complex files complex files where, where you had to recover quickly. Sounds like you both have had that experience. You know, recovery and restoration is, something that you can do, you know, obviously, because of the architecture, because of the immutable object storage that we use. That's you're changing a pointer and you're back to the the version instantly. Any other thoughts around recovery or or have we covered that all? It's fast and it works. Exactly. Yeah. And I I've had to recover an entire year of projects whenever I first was implementing this. I made a boo boo and used a mirror instead of a robocopy when seeding data. So I actually blew out a whole bunch of data. I recovered the entire year. I think about 2 minutes. It was close to, like, 10 terabytes of data. Recovered in 2 minutes. You basically just rename the old folder. Just don't recover the folder. It just brings pointers back. It doesn't actually need to bring the data back. So it only takes a few minutes to do. Right. Right. Alright. Excellent. Yeah. I I do remember when I when I first came to the Suni, so I was looking I was learning the architecture and I was like, wait a second. This is fast. This is a game changer from a from a backup and recovery perspective. Alright. Good good point. So, you know, you've got a there's a bunch of people on the call right now. Sort of, you know, they're all either, you know, investigating the Suny, considering their options, looking at their strategy for 2025 and beyond. What other lessons would you would you share about using the Suny? I know you I know you both obviously have had great experiences for the most part. Is there any, any lessons or, you know, best practices or tips you would share with somebody if they if they if they called you and asked you about your experience? One of the good things that it helped on our side is because the surveyors and engineers in our firm like drive letters, and with the Nasuni implementation, we were able to keep all of their drive letters the same. So that meant that we didn't have any problem with x references or dereferences breaking inside of our drawings, and the it made the adoption really, really straightforward. Everyone got comfortable with it, and then we were able to consolidate our projects and our proposals into one directory as opposed to having them broken up geographically, which made a tremendous amount of information. The upload process to get it in was was pretty straightforward. We were able to do that, you know, relatively smoothly one office at a time and, you know, it seemed to work has worked really well for us since we got it here. Brian? Yeah. That's the same thing I did. I you know, whenever I implemented this, I would go I would see the data I would send, like, a hard drive out to the site where I was copying your data from, and I would copy all the data to that hard drive. I would bring it back to my Pittsburgh office where I had high amounts of bandwidth, and I would seed that data. And then I would actually, you know, prep the server out there and get all the volumes and everything set up. You can script this, and I can literally have a Nasuni server up and running in about 15 minutes. So I never had any issue with that. Whenever we would, I would ship the server off to their site. I would then do a final sync of the data, which brings their current most recent data into cache. So everything's already sitting there for them ready to go. They don't have to pull anything down from the cloud, and they would be up and running in no time. The other thing that I like that I learned was always keep your archive and your global project volume on the same thing. That makes archiving, so that you get rid of old projects and put them somewhere else, very simple. If that project comes back to life, you can move it back in no time at all. It has literally made it where I I got my engineers and project managers and staff where they can actually close out projects. They're not afraid to close out a project to get it off the books because they know they can bring it back to life if they have to or come back on it. Because whenever you're going through some of these folders, you know, we have about 7 to 8,000 projects that we create per year. So getting those ones that aren't really gonna be a final project that we lose the bid or anything like that, you know, getting them off of the server so people don't have to filter through them quickly, makes life a lot easier for them. Right. Right. Excellent. Alright. So I've got one last question for you. And our for for both of you. And it has to do with the future. You know, when when you're planning ahead, you know, here we are getting ready to go and do another year, kind of looking at your own crystal balls. What's what's the future trend that that you you think is gonna be most important or you or maybe you're paying the most attention to when you think about, you know, AEC project data and how and how you make use of it? Well, for me, I think that, you know, with AI coming about so much and being pushed so hard right now, I think we're pretty far ahead of the game because all of our data is already in the cloud and it's in one spot. So that whenever any tools are released to be able to manipulate manipulate that data or access that data, we're gonna be far ahead of the game than most people that have their, data spread all over the country. I think that's one big thing for us. And we can also use cognitive search on it as well through Azure. Right. How about you, Charles? So there's a couple different things that we'd wanna do. If I were sitting here this time next year, I would love to be able to say that I have an interface where I can look at a project and ask a question or have it say, based on this project and all the information that's here, I would like a project summary. I would like a lessons learned sheet. Or look at a group of specifications and say, can I find a specification related to this particular component across the entire platform? And those are gonna be a combination of AI and cognitive search. And the nice part about Nasuni, as Brian mentioned, is it's already in the cloud. So how can we curate that data, make sure that we're working with it, you know, clean pieces of it, and then allow our users to interact with that in a in a secure fashion so that we're using our information to reduce hallucinations and to give them a great experience. Excellent. And I'll tell you what, Charles. You are not alone on that one at all. I think it's a it's something we hear a lot, and it's a it's a really a natural stepping stone. You both you both mentioned just now having everything in one place. And, I was at an event not long ago, just a couple months ago. And the the the the the keynote speaker said, you know, if you you cannot have an AI strategy at all until you have a data strategy. You have you have to have that foundation in place. And and a key component of that is having all of the data, the right data, the accurate one version of the truth in a single location. Right? You've got to minimize hallucinations or even or or anything that's, you know, you know, bad data in, bad results out. Right? It's it's it's not hard. And a lot of folks wanna be able to leverage the existing, IP, the experience on these similar projects or or or cross lark and Uber projects to be able to, to do just that, to be able to, like, get understanding whether they're doing, you know, analysis afterwards or they simply wanna say, what do we what do we typically do when we're in this type of construction project, for example? And and leverage that and go out and get that and gather all that data into a single location to guide the next project. So and that is something that, we are absolutely doing. So real quick, I'm gonna we're gonna go into q and a here in a moment. But, on that on that note, there's a number of things coming from Nasuni this year. Because like I said, we're always focused on, you know, what else do we need to do? What else is are are customers looking to do? We're continually looking to improve and the experience around, excuse me, advanced global file locking, anything to do with performance. Right? Is if you can get another, get another couple miles per hour out of it, you you do so. Right? And so we're and that's what we're doing with with, with GFL and large scale directory listings because there's, you know, there's always something that, you know, you you we handle very large directories today, but somebody's always got a larger one. Right? So you can kinda keep up with that. You know, both, as we're talking about analytics and and and and AI, key to that is being able to understand and have a better dashboard view into your file usage and performance. And so we have a number of, of, of of products either out or coming out that are that are dedicated to that that visibility, being able to really understand the scope of your environment. And part of that tied into an improved administrative management console that we also will be delivering in the first half of the year. If any of you are using CrowdStrike, we're integrating that as doing same integration like we do with Microsoft Sentinel and others, So you can integrate into your security operations reporting if anybody is in the crowd is doing that. And, you know, listen, ransomware ransomware is always a game of, you know, staying up with the staying up with the bad guys and keeping up. And so we're always doing advancements to our ransomware protection schemes, false positive detection, that sort of thing. That's that's a unfortunately, that's a never ending, game there. Right? So a number of improvements coming, you know, from Nasuni, you know, that are that are actually gonna benefit all customers, but there's some particular improvements for the AEC space as we continue to evolve the product. I wanna go ahead and and and, get to q and a. You know, we I I had a slide in here around, you know, value the value for the firms. You know, both of you said, look, you know, when in your in your evaluation process, the most important thing is talking to other customers like yourselves. And that's why we, you know, we so appreciate you being here. It's one thing for us as a vendor, as the creators of the product to tell you how great it is. But it's you know, the the it doesn't matter what we say. It matters what our customers say. And and and that's that's really the heart of the matter. And so anything we can do to derive value and drive success, you know, it's a win it's honestly, it's a win win. Right? So, there's more information for all of you, that are attending today. Obviously, there's only so much we can cram into a webinar and our discussions, but encourage you to visit the Nasuni AEC page at the sunni.com/solutions and, and learn more. There's lots to learn more. There's lots of testimonials, lots of data to help you with your evaluation process. Okay. So we're we do have time for a few questions, and we and we got well, we got quite a few. So here we go. Let's let's, Tony says, hey. I just jumped off the crowd strike vote. Alright. Well, we need some people that jumped off the CrowdStrike boat after what happened last this earlier this year. And I don't think, Delta Airlines is gonna be too interested. But, you know, there's, but it still remains very popular. We did have a lot of customer demand saying, hey. We, you know, we need we'd like to officially integrate with CrowdStrike. And some of you, if you're using other ones, yes, you can integrate because really you're just sharing syslog event data, but that's another topic. Here's a question. I don't know if I can answer this to be honest. How does Autodesk Sheet Set Manager work in Nasuni? Any issues? How do either of you have familiarity with the rest sheets that you do? Works great. No problems. Yeah. I haven't heard of any issues with that at all. Now the only issue we did have whenever we migrated, was with data shortcuts. Well, so and and that was basically user created. Basically, they were mapping data shortcuts to the old server, so things were taking a long time to crack open. So, there's a bulk rename function within the data shortcut thing in Autodesk. I don't even know what it is anymore. But, they could actually rename all the data shortcuts. So, that was one of the things that we learned. Another weird thing with AutoCAD, was the worst thing I've ever probably experienced. I literally the first file I put in, everything was working fine. We migrated the data. I did not have a single phone call while I'm sitting in their office after putting this new server. I'm like, this is too good to be true. What's going on? I downed the old server, packed it in the truck, started driving home, and my phone starts going nuts. Everything started going really slow for some reason. We couldn't figure out why. We ended up figuring out what the issue was, and it's mind blowing. So this will be one of your lessons learned. Make sure that your printer and AutoCAD get remapped to the new server name if you change your server name for the print server because that was what the cause of everything slowing down was. Oddly, they're not even trying to print, not even trying to plot, but with those Autodesk is doing something with those printers that slowed it down. Yeah. Not something you would guess right off the top. Right? I was lucky. We had a really good, design technology manager at the time that was able to pin it down pretty quickly and solve it. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. I'm gonna move on to a couple more questions, see how many we can squeeze in here before we run out of time. Elizabeth Bowman, she asks, how have you managed the geodatabase files related to GIS? Don't turn on global file locking on any files with GIS, gdb files. Do not do it unless you really wanna make your life miserable. Yeah. That's a that's a great point. There are scenarios where you don't want to turn to turn that on. Right? That's correct. Nasuni has scripts that you can run so that even if you have specific sets of folders, you cannot turn on global file locking as part of a script. So whenever I do my project setups, I know where those gdb files are gonna be located, and I do not turn on file locking on them. That's usually not an issue because people working on those gdb files are all local anyway. Because what happens is if you open up a gdb file and look at it, it's like a million little files that every time it touches inside that file, it locks it. So it's constantly doing this lock, unlock, lock, unlock as you're moving entities inside the GIS application. So as soon as somebody tells me they have problem with Esri, ArcInfo, or ArcPro running slow, we look at where the GDE files are. It's in that wrong folder. We know that's their issue. Move it out the other folder, it works hard. Another lesson learned. There you go. Great great question. Excuse me. Elizabeth, appreciate that. I think we answered this question a little bit, but I'll I'll read it here. Jeff asks, can you provide some context of when your team cut over to Nasuni? How long did it take? Did the users I don't like that was much of an issue from some of the conversation before. And what is it? Any changes someone moving to the Suni should be aware of in terms of cut over dates? I think it's probably gonna vary depending on the size of the organization, but how I mean, maybe it's a start. How was how was your cutover process from from when you moved to Nasuni? We ended up working with every one of our offices, syncing the data up there, and then kind of office by office because they were running off of a rep a a rep a virtual representation inside of the vicinity of their physical server. We prestaged the data like Brian described. Then the night before we shut off the old server, we would do, a final sync. It would cache everything locally on the filer that's in the office, shut it down, and everybody's up and running. We were able to do all of our sites in, like, a month. We were able to do multiple sites in the same day. And once we got where we were going, everything was was pretty smooth. It takes some planning and you wanna make sure that you communicate with your end users about what's happening, but the it was pretty transparent for them from a from a organizational perspective. Yeah. I I was I did the same thing except I took about a year and a half to do mine probably. And, you know, we, you know, I basically did site by site as hardware aged out. So we weren't in any rush to do this. So if I had a server that was only 2 years old, I waited till it's 5 years old to replace it. Or, like, they can deal with it for a little bit. But it ended up taking about a year, maybe a year and a half at the most. Most people didn't even notice it. It was like they came in, I said, okay. Run this script. It remaps their drive letters into server. Read it because I changed my print server names. I made everything consistent with it. And, they literally came in, clicked one script, and were working in no time at all. And, it was just as seamless as can be. Basically, Nasuni will tell you, like, I paid to have some of my data migrated by Nasuni, but I had them do one site and I saw how they did it. And I'm like, oh, I can do that same thing myself. I don't even need you guys to do anything. Because basically, you pre stage your data where nobody can see it or hit it, and then whenever that's finally done, you use a move command just to slide it back over to the correct location. So we have all of our data integrated. Nasuni Services can help you with all of that. Yeah. Thanks, Brian. I mean, we we, we definitely have a lot of customers do that. We, you know, we can do we can do the whole thing for you. We get you started. A lot of customers are like, okay. Well, that was pretty easy. I'll do that myself. No problem. And then they they can take their because a lot of people just yeah. They're not in a huge rush, but they wanna, you know, start the process and keep things moving. I have one last question. We're gonna get kicked off this webinar in about 50 seconds. Okay. So I just wanted to quickly, first of all, thank you both for joining us, and thank you all for attending. One last question though real quick if we can pull it off. Do you, what's been your experience with the SUNY tech support? They're outstanding. They I mean, we had a we had an issue that was not related in Nasuni 3 days ago. We had somebody on the phone within, you know, 15 minutes because there was a lot of stuff that was out. It turned out to be a configuration on our our side because the data center lost power. They were able to help us identify and resolve it, and then followed up to make sure that everything was working correctly. They have been one of the best tech support organizations that I've ever worked with. Thank you. Thank you. Mine's kind of the opposite. I've it's I just like to help you out. Guys, we're gonna get I'm sorry to do this. We are gonna get kicked off. Something. Okay. Thanks everybody for attending, and, look forward to seeing you at another session. Alright. We can we can click the leave stage now. Sorry sorry about that, guys. I the counter was running. I'm like, I don't wanna stop. I don't wanna stop. One of the things about this this platform is it doesn't let you go over. Remember how we thought it was gonna be 30 minutes and then we we left 45? Yeah. We should've done it longer. But but, so there we are. Well, listen.