18 01732 759725 END USER COMPUTING Like many architectural practices, SimpsonHaugh Architects (see box) is modernising its IT infrastructure to support the evolving needs of clients and employees, with a particular focus on boosting productivity, enhancing collaboration, improving the remote working experience and future-proofing systems to support ongoing growth and new technologies, such as AI. The firm’s multi-year, £1.2 million IT modernisation project, implemented with the support of managed services provider and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) consultancy ebb3, builds on changes the practice was forced to make during the pandemic, including the centralisation of IT in Manchester to avoid the time and expense of managing systems in different locations and the extension of an existing, very small Citrix environment for remote working across the practice. “When Covid hit, we upscaled the Citrix environment and took the decision to move all the compute data from our London office to our Manchester HQ. Ours is a very small IT team – there are only two of us – and going down to London during the pandemic to turn on a PC seemed like a non-starter,” explains Information Management Partner Dave Moyes. Initially, employees accessed Citrix through physical high-end workstations, but as these have a high support overhead and have become increasingly powerhungry and unreliable, in 2022 ebb3 implemented a more traditional VDI solution featuring a number of hosts just running Windows and VMware. “People in the London office don’t have a huge piece of physical tin under their desk any more. They’ve got tiny endpoints,” explains Moyes. “That they can connect on Citrix and get to the compute power somewhere else was a bit of a shock for them. But actually Covid helped with some of this because people were used to working from home off a laptop or an iPad and that gave them some comfort that Citrix did provide an experience almost equivalent to being sat in front of a physical machine.” Moyes adds that this decision has via affordable, energy-efficient small form factor PCs, laptops and Chromebooks, with the majority still using physical workstations. Over the next three to five years, as workstations reach end of life, it will move these users across to virtual desktops. “Like most professional services businesses, we sweat an asset until it’s physically not able to be sweated any further, which is why we’re in this hybrid environment with physical PCs and the VDI. We will continue to sweat those physical PCs until they break and we can’t repair them. Those physical PCs are high end gaming machines, so they’re not cheap boxes and they’re not on a three-year life cycle.” The VDI solution itself is deployed on-premises in SimpsonHaugh’s own datacentre in Manchester. This was preferred to hosting in the cloud to avoid high storage costs caused by the very large file sizes generated by architects, typically around 500 MB for a Revit file, and ongoing ingress and egress charges for Delta changes to files that a team of 20 might be working on. TCO and ROI Moyes estimates that the new VDI infrastructure costs 10% to 20% more than buying the same number of desktops, when you take into account extra licensing costs, network upgrades, investment in the on-premises datacentre and implementation and training costs. “Because it’s new technology, it’s not the same as just putting in 60 desktop computers or 100 desktop computers, where everybody tends to know what they’re getting and has been through the process before. There’s an additional learning curve and the additional cost of the VMware licensing for the desktops and Microsoft licensing for the VDI machines.” While the new system does have a higher cost (although the phased implementation means that it can be delivered within existing ICT budgets set at 5-7% of revenue), its TCO and ROI benefits easily outstrip the total cost of the entire modernisation project, which is precipitated far-reaching changes to the firm’s IT infrastructure to support its implementation of a hybrid VDI solution, integrating virtual and physical desktops and Citrix HDX for a better remote working experience, that is robust enough to support the use of GPU-intensive applications like Revit, Rhino, SketchUp and Enscape, as well as Microsoft 365. “It’s not just a question of putting in a VDI solution; it is about strategically considering the whole environment. We’ve upgraded our networks and put in new switches; we’ve upgraded our storage solution – we’re moving away from NetApp to Nutanix for storage, and we’re also moving away from physical Intel servers for the server virtual environment onto a Nutanix compute cluster to try and reduce the number of nodes that we have, bring down the overall operational cost of those devices and hopefully extend their lifespan.” Hybrid deployment Today, SimpsonHaugh is running a hybrid environment with 30% to 40% of employees using virtual desktop accessed How ControlUp is helping SimpsonHaugh optimise the end user experience as it transitions to virtual desktops VDI with added reassurance SimpsonHaugh is an award-winning UK-based architectural practice founded in 1987 by Ian Simpson and Rachel Haugh. Ranked 48th in the AJ100, the Architects’ Journal index of the top architectural firms in the UK, it employs 100 staff split across studios in Manchester, London and Birmingham. In the year to March 31, 2023, it had sales of £10.3 million, with net profit before tax of £1.3 million. Notable schemes include Deansgate Square; One Blackfriars; 14 Westfield Avenue; The Engineering Innovation Centre (University of Central Lancashire); Circus West Village (Battersea Power Station Phase 1); 4 Angel Square, part of the 20-acre NOMA area in Manchester; and Manchester College’s new City Centre Campus, shortlisted in the 2024 RIBA North West Awards. www.simpsonhaugh.com Dave Moyes
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