Case Study: Mead & Hunt achieves simplified expansion, global file locking and cost savings with Panzura

Mead & Hunt Drives Rapid Growth, Simplifies IT, Reduces Costs

Mead & Hunt, a 480‑employee engineering and architectural firm with 27 offices across 16 states, was struggling to support a rapidly growing, distributed workforce running large design applications like Civil 3D and Revit. Each new office required local servers, SANs and on‑site IT time for installation and tuning, creating high equipment and travel costs, slow file access and frequent file‑locking problems when teams in different locations collaborated on the same projects.

By deploying Panzura Cloud Filers and centralizing project data into Amazon S3, Mead & Hunt reduced on‑site hardware to a single AD server, a preconfigured Panzura rack and basic networking, cutting deployment time to days and lowering costs, heat and energy use. Panzura’s Global Read/Write, deduplication, encryption and file‑access acceleration eliminated file‑locking issues, sped file opens from minutes to seconds, simplified redundancy and backups, and enabled the company to expand quickly and securely with predictable IT overhead.

Mead & Hunt

Andy Knauf

Vice President and Director of IT