Stimson Lumber Branches Out on an OVHcloud HPC
Stimson Lumber Branches Out on an OVHcloud HPC
Stimson Lumber Company stretches across Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The company operates seven mills in Oregon and Idaho and owns and sustainably manages over 500,000 acres of forest land. Stimson prides itself on being an efficient, process-driven company focused on managing a seamless supply chain — from tree sapling to retail distribution centers. To perform at this level, Stimson requires a high-performing and stable technology platform.
Challenges
Stimson’s IT team needed to add several new systems to their IT enterprise, including a new ERP and accounting software applications. They couldn’t continue to host everything on-site, but they didn’t want to share space on a server or be limited by hardware either. The challenge required a top-notch, stable solution that was custom-built to their needs. Stimson was previously a VMware vCloud Air customer and when OVHcloud acquired vCloud Air from VMware, the Stimson IT team had a choice to go elsewhere. But, after researching and comparing several other options, they chose to migrate everything to OVHcloud.
Solution Delivered
After doing their research, Greg Baumgardner, Stimson’s long-time IT Director, determined OVHcloud was by far the best solution. OVHcloud offered its own dedicated bare metal servers and its own new data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, backed up to its new data center in Vint Hill, Virginia. The OVHcloud team recommended Veeam as the backup and disaster recovery solution, which integrates well with VMware. And, with OVHcloud and Veeam® together, a two-stage redundant backup is automatically and fully replicated at the second data center to ensure the ultimate level of security and safety. Since OVHcloud owns their 20Tb global fiber backbone, Stimson to able to avoid paying ingress and egress charges when they back up their data. This is also why Stimson is planning to replicate their data in the future, thus making their disaster recovery strategy more robust with predictable costs.
Results, ROI, and Future Plans
By moving everything from on-prem and vCloud Air, Stimson feels that OVHcloud has provided them with better performance and the stable platform they need for seamless operations. Stimson’s IT team liked that OVHcloud offers its own dedicated hosts in Hosted Private Cloud, and no other customer’s VMs are sitting on the same hardware. They also liked that OVHcloud had its own powerful, secure data centers. And, they appreciate that there are no ingress, egress, additional storage or API call fees. All combined, OVHcloud is helping to support Stimson’s mission to be a stable, sustainable business that benefits customers, employees, shareholders, and communities. In the future, they plan to add a second Hosted Private Cloud in Virginia to enhance their Disaster Recovery plans.
Special thanks to Greg Baumgardner, who served as the IT Director at Stimson Lumber Company for nearly 30 years. A few of his areas of specialty include IT process improvement and change management, vendor management, cloud computing, and disaster recovery.