An Ohio-based engineering firm came to us looking for a new place to run their servers. Their team creates thousands of engineering and design projects, all of which require secure, reliable infrastructure.

That kind of work runs on specialized engineering and design applications — software with strict performance requirements where latency isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it affects how the work gets done.

The Objective

This engineering firm wanted to find a reliable, low-latency infrastructure solution capable of supporting demanding engineering applications with redundant power, internet, and cooling, and without the unpredictability of a public cloud environment.

The Challenge

The engineering firm’s design and engineering applications had been running on legacy on-premises hardware. The decision was made to modernize by migrating to Azure’s public cloud platform.

The migration introduced new challenges. The applications had strict latency requirements that public cloud infrastructure struggled to support consistently. Application responsiveness became inconsistent. On top of that, Azure’s billing varied with utilization in ways that were difficult to predict, and platform changes introduced by Azure created compatibility challenges with the legacy applications the team depended on.

The cloud migration that was supposed to solve the problem created new operational challenges. They needed to move their hardware back — but this time, into an environment with proper redundancy, reliable connectivity, and the physical infrastructure to support it long term.

The Solution

DataYard worked with the engineering firm to understand what the environment actually needed: a place to house new server hardware with redundant power, internet, and cooling, and 24x7x365 facility access.

DataYard deployed:

• Dedicated cabinet space in DataYard’s Ohio data center
• Redundant 208V / 30A power circuits
• A 1G x 1G fiber internet hand-off
• 24x7x365 facility access via RFID access cards
• A block of static IP addresses

This co-location environment gave the engineering firm the physical infrastructure and connectivity their applications required — without the latency overhead, unpredictable billing, or compatibility challenges introduced by the public cloud environment.

The Result

The firm’s business-critical applications are now running on their own hardware in a purpose-built data center environment with redundant power, cooling, and internet connectivity.

The latency and performance issues experienced during the public cloud migration were resolved. Billing is predictable, and platform changes don’t happen on someone else’s schedule.

For an engineering firm where application performance directly affects how work gets done, getting infrastructure right isn’t optional. Co-location with DataYard gave the firm the control and reliability it needed without the trade-offs that came with public cloud infrastructure.