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 onsite, 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 choice. 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 OVHcloud S3 Object Storage for their scale out repository. 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 its 70Tbps global fiber backbone, Stimson is able to avoid paying ingress and egress charges when they back up their data without sacrificing performance. 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 Virgina to enhance their Disaster Recovery plans.

About OVHcloud

OVHcloud US is a subsidiary of OVHcloud, a global player and Europe’s leading cloud provider operating more than 400,000 servers within 37 data centers across four continents. For over 20 years, the company has relied on an integrated model that provides complete control of its value chain from the design of its servers to the construction and management of its data centers, including the orchestration of its fiber-optic network. This unique approach allows it to independently cover all the uses of its 1.6 million customers in more than 140 countries. OVHcloud now off ers latest generation solutions combining performance, price predictability, and total sovereignty over their data to support their growth in complete freedom.

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.