
Penspen accelerates shift to Windows virtual desktops with Nasuni

About Penspen
Penspen provides engineering and management services to the oil and gas industry in over 100 countries worldwide. Founded in the U.K. in 1954, the company has undertaken more than 10,000 projects and now has major offices in London, Mexico, Houston, Abu Dhabi, and Bangkok.The challenge
Facing a global pandemic, Penspen needed to confidently support remote environments.
Penspen differentiates itself based on the technical and operational quality of service the company delivers to its clients and partners. This emphasis on technical and operational excellence inspired the firm’s IT leaders to modernize its infrastructure. Prior to the pandemic, Penspen’s small IT team had begun to experiment with VDI through Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) instances. Several of its engineering machines were approaching the end of life, and the IT team was testing whether high-powered virtual desktops could handle the demands of their critical engineering software.Then, COVID-19 struck. “At the last minute, we needed to get people quickly working from home,” recalls Penspen Infrastructure Engineer Michael Norman. “The majority of our technical staff are in the U.K. and Southeast Asia. They don’t all have laptops that would allow them to VPN into the office, so they needed a way to work from home using their own devices.”
How Nasuni helped Penspen
Nasuni and Microsoft Windows virtual desktop support remote work.
Penspen had already deployed a Nasuni Edge Appliance virtual machine in Azure as a failover for its UK offices. To support its now remote workforce, the firm stood up WVD instances in the Azure regions closest to its employees and pointed each of those virtual desktops back to the Azure-based Nasuni appliance. “The transition was seamless,” says Andrew Bond, director of IT at Penspen. “We ran some tests, spun up resources in the key regions, and then optimized them as our design teams started to work from home. They simply logged on, and it was as if they were working in the office.”Edge and Nasuni provide a single source of truth.
With Nasuni, Penspen can spin up Edge Appliances to cache active files wherever fast access is needed – and spin those VMs down just as quickly. Yet that single source of truth is still the gold copies of all files stored in Azure Blob.Nasuni provides cost-effective cloud usage.
Nasuni ensures that all file data scales in low-cost Azure Blob storage, while the Edge Appliances running in Azure use only a small amount of Azure premium disk to deliver high-performance I/O for frequently used files. Thanks to Nasuni’s intelligent caching algorithms, Penspen only provisions premium disk for 1.8% of its total storage footprint. Even that, Norman estimates, could be overkill, and his team might reduce that number.Azure and Nasuni makes hybrid and WFH set ups effortless and secure.
Today, companies are uncertain about whether they’re going to need to support a fully work-from-home (WFH) environment, an office-centric model, or a more flexible hybrid setup. Nasuni allows Penspen to adapt to any of these models. If its users return to the office, lightweight Nasuni Edge Appliances will be waiting on-premises to give them fast access to the files they need. Either way, Nasuni maintains a single source of truth for all file data in Azure.Nasuni Edge Appliance VMs provide fast VDI performance for all global users.
In any VDI deployment, the closer the files are to the VDI instances, the better the performance. For that reason, Penspen is considering deploying Nasuni Edge Appliance VMs in other Azure regions, such as Southeast Asia, to optimize performance for local engineers. Even in the current scenario, however, with global WVD users accessing the Azure-based Nasuni appliance in the U.K., performance has met expectations. “The users in the US who are using the UK VM’s were impressed with how quick it was pulling up the images they needed, because some of the CAD drawings are quite large,” says Norman. “With the WVD instances and Nasuni file storage being in the same Azure data center, you’re using the Microsoft links and back ends, and it’s very quick.”Nasuni makes IT management easy.
Despite its global presence, Penspen has a small IT team, so any solution that reduces IT workload is beneficial. “With Nasuni we’re not having to look after all the hardware, the backups, the backup tapes, and everything else that goes along with them,” notes Norman. “Nasuni is quite easy. You set it and forget it.”Nasuni’s fast ransomware recovery minimizes downtime.
Like so many other large global enterprises, Penspen must manage the occasional ransomware incident, and Nasuni has proven to be a valuable asset here as well. “We’ve had a few issues with files or folders that caught ransomware, but we caught it quickly and rolled back to the last Nasuni snapshot within a few hours,” Norman says. “Nasuni saves you that time of going offsite, getting tapes, bringing them back, cutting open the tapes, reading them. With Nasuni, it’s a quick click a box and go, and then all the files are back.”Penspen’s shift to Nasuni delivered real value as we transitioned our entire global workforce to a working-from-home model without having to worry about disrupting project delivery, global collaboration or productivity.
Michael Norman, Infrastructure Engineer, Penspen
The Nasuni difference
Nasuni’s cloud-native approach to file storage leads to a wide range of benefits, including a single global namespace for all file data. It also gives enterprises like Penspen a more agile, flexible infrastructure, which allows companies to respond quickly to unexpected events or strategic shifts.As Nasuni innovates, Penspen is exploring new functionalities, including the Nasuni Analytics Connector. Overall, Nasuni’s integration with Azure and Windows Virtual Desktops, combined with its versatility as a replacement for traditional file storage and backup, have solidified the platform’s position as a critical piece of Penspen’s infrastructure for years to come. “The agility we get from Nasuni’s cloud-based file synchronization technology and Microsoft’s cloud virtual desktops is going to make us think long and hard when the time comes to purchase our next set of physical workstations,” says Bond.
Industry: Oil and gas
Cloud file storage: Nasuni
Object storage: Microsoft Azure Blob storage
Use cases: VDI; NAS consolidation; backup/DR to the cloud; global multi-site collaboration
Benefits: Agile, adaptive infrastructure; unlimited scale in the cloud; reduced global storage infrastructure footprint; handsoff data protection; rapid ransomware recovery