Case Study: C&S Companies achieves 99.3% reduction in file open times and LAN‑speed CAD access with Panzura Freedom Collaboration

C&S Companies Improves Productivity, Eliminates CAD Latency

C&S Companies is a 550+ employee Architecture, Engineering, and Construction firm with 20+ offices across the U.S. Its distributed design teams struggled with severe CAD performance issues—Revit, Civil 3D and MicroStation files could take over 20 minutes to open due to latency and thousands of file system round-trips to centralized storage, preventing real-time collaboration and reducing productivity despite increased bandwidth.

C&S deployed Panzura Freedom Collaboration—a distributed global file system with centralized, redundant cloud storage and site controllers—so designers could work as if files were local. The change effectively eliminated latency, cutting file open times from around 20 minutes to about 90 seconds for cold reads and ~8 seconds for subsequent reads (a ~99.3% reduction, ~150x improvement), enabled real-time multi-site collaboration, and added cloud-based data protection and scalability.

C&S Companies

Eric Quinn

Director of IT