Barton Malow employs over 1,000 full time staff, including 350+ trades personnel, and has experience in 37 states and the Distric of Columbia.  Revenues for the previous five years were in excess of $1 billion annually.  Barton Malow is consistently ranked among the top 10 builders in the nation in their niche markets.

Office Locations:

Headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, Barton Malow has regional offices in Maryland, Virginia, Arizona, Ohio, Illinois, Florida, and Georgia, in addition to project control centers at all major project sites.

Key Contacts:

Phil Go, CIO

Matt Rouse, Corporate I.T

Overview of infrastructre:

Barton Malow's offices are connected via MPLS cloud, as well as several Cisco VPN connections.  Servers are in place at all remote office locations, where project data is stored for each specific remote office. 

Pain Point:

Barton Malow's primary concern was in handling large multi-media files used by it's marketing department, including large powerpoint presentations and images.  These files would take several minutes to open over the existing WAN.  As marketing people from several offices use these multimedia files and images to create new content, copying from, and saving to the corporate server was extremely unproductive, and prevented real-time sharing of information across the marketing group.

Solution:

Barton Malow implemented a Steelhead 6120 for the corporate office, and Steelhead 1050-H devices for the remote offices.  Because of the amount of data involved, a strategy of "pre-warming" the remote office Steelhead data stores with the marketing data ensured the remote office personnel with "warm" data from the very start.  Notes Barton Malow CIO, Phil Go, "We found that prepopulation of the 1050H is a key to our success with the device.  In addition, we found that a sufficiently sized data store is a necessity".

Additional benefits:

With a goal of removing the remote file servers altogether, a solution was developed for remote office field personnel who collect and create data in the field and save the data back to the corporate office storage servers, in preparation for eventual remote office server removal.  Using Riverbed's PFS capability, CSG and Barton Malow created a partition on the device's harddrive for users to "drop" their new data, which can then be pulled over the WAN overnight to the corporate office data storage.  By doing so, the end user has the benefit of a quick "save" to "local" drive, while the pull to the corporate server collects the data to ensure backup and security, but also provides everyone else who may need to access that data with a "warm" hit.  "The ability to run VMWare and PFS for server replacement is a great bonus we did not expect", says Mr. Go.

Running applications such as Revit across the WAN is an additional benefit to the Riverbed solution, as Barton Malow has also implemented the Steelhead Mobile Controller for remote project team members connecting via VPN, as well as the Steelhead devices between Barton Malow offices.

Closing Quote:

"The response from our end-user community has been overwhelmingly positive since the Riverbed Steelhead implementation at Barton Malow.  Our investment has given us immediate ROI with easily measurable results!"

            -Phil Go, Barton Malow CIO