The sky-high IT expectations of architects, and how one team meets them

SimpsonHaugh’s IT team rolled out VDI and reduced downtime by 15%

Architecture is changing. Not just city skylines, but the practice of designing buildings too. So says David Moyes, head of digital at SimpsonHaugh, the firm behind such striking structures as One Blackfriars in London (pictured) and Deansgate Square in Manchester.

For one thing, many architects now spend part of the week working remotely, something unthinkable before Covid, but which now allows architectural practices (which are experiencing a skills gap to match that in IT) to offer an improved work-life balance and cater for employees who spend significant time in other locations.

"It was a culture shock for the industry, the fact architects can work successfully from home," Moyes said. Fortunately, in a good way.

It has also been something of a culture shock for the small IT team too, also in a good way, prompting a move from the physical to the virtual.

Previously, architects would come to the office to use the beefy £6,500 machines (64GB RAM, Core i9 CPU, 12GB graphics card) required to run resource-intensive specialist software like Rhino, Revit and AutoCAD. However, at SimpsonHaugh these PCs were becoming unreliable, and regular failures were causing problems for architectural staff and IT alike. A decision had to be made. Then Covid made it for them.

From the physical to the virtual

In 2020, SimpsonHaugh closed its London office - no longer seeing much use because of the pandemic - moved all the PCs to its Manchester premises where the IT team was based, and rolled out Citrix in its northern datacentre to allow remote access. At the same time, it also began a serious investigation as to whether virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) could adequately replace its ageing machines long-term, providing a more flexible basis for remote working and an estate that would be easier to maintain.

This took shape two years later, with a three-node Citrix VDI cluster installed in Manchester (SimpsonHaugh is very much on-prem first, for reasons we'll explore in a future article), primarily to support the London office.

"People started to return to the office, so we put in very small thin clients down in London," said Moyes.

Delivering an end-user experience equal to or better than that offered by a high-end physical PC was of paramount concern. Architects are time-poor, and the specialist applications in daily use are "not very good at giving up resource when you close them." There was thus a danger of serious latency scuppering the UX, leading to rejection. Indeed, there were mutterings in the early days.

"If an end user was doing something that was graphically intensive or computationally intensive with Rhino or Revit, the machine felt like it was frozen, which was one of the main initial complaints that were coming back from the users."

To mitigate this, SimpsonHaugh worked with the MSP and consultancy ebb3, first bumping up the Citrix thin clients to 8GB, and then deploying the digital experience platform ControlUp to give Moyes' team visibility and a handle on balancing the load to prevent performance glitches.

Sky-high expectations

Architecture presents a particular challenge for those tasked with managing networked resources, because of the nature of the workloads, the exploratory nature of the profession and typically tight timelines. In short, architects are demanding users.

"As architectural designers, they literally want to pitch up and get on with design. Being in a creative industry it's very difficult because they have no bounds, and they don't want anything blocking what they can do."

Fortunately, moving to the VDI setup has helped the IT team meet these demands in several ways, Moyes went on, not least in reducing downtime. Instead of having to repair expensive PCs, most issues can now be solved with a simple reboot of the VDI box, starting a clean session.

With ControlUp providing visibility across its three offices and home working, Moyes' small team has also been to remotely diagnose issues with users' home setups and offer troubleshooting advice, such as moving closer to the router - or changing their ISP. And with ebb3 providing technical support, they have been able to manage the infrastructure without having to add to the headcount.

Downtime down 15%

All in all, SimpsonHaugh calculates that downtime affecting its architects is down by 15% compared to using physical machines, with less break-fix, fewer hardware and software issues and with files and applications opening faster. This has enabled the architects to work equally well from home or in the office for tasks that require less collaboration. It equates to a potential £1.79 million in lost time saved, according to the company.

Over the next three to five years the company is seeking to expand its VDI to cover the whole business, replacing the workstations as they approach end of life. There are also plans to upgrade the network to a 25Gb Ethernet backbone, and to introduce Nutanix to manage the virtual server environment. In this way it hopes to be able to keep up with continual increases in demand.

"Architecture is significantly more complex than it was 10 years ago," said Moyes. "And the technology is getting significantly more complex as well."

In part two of this interview, we'll be looking at how SimpsonHaugh is using AI to help handle this complexity, as well as availing itself of new opportunities presented by the technology.