NIMBOXX today announced that its software-defined data center solution has been selected by Fulghum Industries Inc., a provider of heavy equipment manufacturing services to the forest products industry. NIMBOXX will help the company create a virtual private cloud infrastructure that connects remote mill sites to a series of strategically situated regional data centers.

Fulghum recently started an initiative to computerize its mill machinery to automate complex manufacturing processes, collect valuable data and analyze its opportunities for potential process or equipment improvements. The process involved upgrading and virtualizing Fulghum’s corporate infrastructure using a complex stack of hardware and software solutions from companies including Microsoft, Dell, NetApp, Cisco and HP.

Fulghum’s project required significant integration engineering and maintenance support that ultimately became too complicated and expensive to deploy and train users on in the field – especially when language and international barriers were present.

After initial pilot testing, Fulghum decided to replace its virtual infrastructure with NIMBOXX due to its fast deployment, unbeatable performance, ease of use, lower cost, and vastly smaller footprint.

“Setting up the NIMBOXX environment took seven minutes and we were off and running,” said Aaron Kent, IT director at Fulghum. “In the other environment, it took us four days. Our performance is about 80x faster with NIMBOXX, which is now becoming our primary vendor for all of our data center needs. To be able to consolidate time, resources, energy, money – all of that down to one small box, it’s going to allow our deployments to be a lot faster and more efficient.”

Fulghum’s virtualization project scope has three phases. The first phase is to replace the existing Microsoft/Dell/NetApp/Cisco/HP architecture within its corporate data center. The second is to replace the architecture at one of Fulghum’s remote partner sites. The third phase is to connect these architectures together, providing private cloud storage, disaster recovery and business and data app services from the company’s corporate data center to locations in the field.

Over time, by replacing his entire infrastructure with NIMBOXX, Kent expects to be able to grow the number of virtual machines in the field to several hundred, supporting a broad-based, inter-site VDI and disaster recovery solution – which is critically important in remote areas where consistent, reliable connectivity is generally a problem.

“NIMBOXX is going to allow companies our size or even smaller to have the power to focus on innovative new things and be able to compete in a market where they typically couldn’t compete. This technology has become a central pivot point for our future IT infrastructure and app service plans,” said Kent.

“We’re thrilled to help innovative companies like Fulghum embrace web-scale computing to grow their footprint and competitive position in the market,” said Rocky Bullock, CEO of NIMBOXX. “Hyperconverged infrastructure is the future of IT, and our goal is to make it accessible to companies of all sizes while delivering deployment and performance metrics that can’t be beat.”