Multi-site Collaboration for Worldwide Engineering and Architecture

Introduction

Maffeis Engineering designs and engineers some of the world’s most magnificent large-scale structures. If you’re a soccer fan, you may have seen their stadiums in the 2022 World Cup. They designed and engineered the longest swing railway bridge in the world, spanning the Suez Canal.

Their work goes beyond engineering—and beyond a single site. With headquarters in Solagna, Italy, the Maffeis team depends on Resilio Connect to protect and keep their mission-critical project assets current in real-time for remote teams distributed across many locations.

Al Wahda Arches, Qatar

“When a change is made to one of our 3D design plans, it’s critical that everyone working on the project immediately sees the change and is working from the most current version of the file,” says Emanuele Guidolin, Maffeis’ IT Manager “With Resilio Connect, our engineers always have the most recent designs, wherever they happen to be located.”

Challenges

Maffeis Engineering operates in a highly collaborative multi-site environment where near-real-time project sharing is mission-critical. With a team of more than 300 multidisciplinary contributors across four sites, including engineers, architects, designers, and other staff, they handle large-scale projects with geographically dispersed teams and external partners.

“Every design detail matters,” says Guidolin. “Our primary servers in Italy store many files of many different file types. We use a variety of Autodesk products: AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Inventor, and Navisworks Freedom. We also use CSI Sap2000 for structural engineering and design. These programs generate a large number of calculation result files. Each file is about 2 GB. Each project contains about 200 to 2,000 files—or more than 400 GBs. Some of our projects reach 2 TBs of total data.” 

Their team needs all of these files to be current across all sites. Each engineer needs the latest file version available on their local storage, irrespective of their location.  

Guidolin emphasizes the mission-critical nature of their engineering work. The design process calculates and optimizes many aspects of construction—such as determining the structural integrity forces on each section of the building. Maintaining the latest file versions across all sites is vital, as even small discrepancies can have far-reaching consequences on interdependent projects.

“When a change is made to the design, we need those changes immediately available to everyone across all sites—at the same time. Our design models are used by engineering to calculate and control if the building stays up or down. If someone makes a decision based on inaccurate information, it could be catastrophic—impacting all of our projects.”Emanuele Guidolin, Maffeis Engineering IT Manager

Timely synchronization is crucial for meeting deadlines. Each project has a dedicated team, working under deadline pressure. “We may have a building design due on a Monday. To have this ready, we need geological surveys and other information also ready in a timely manner. Many files are involved. Because so many people collaborate remotely, it’s critical that all of the project files be synchronized concurrently.”

Prior to adopting Resilio, the IT team tried Dropbox, Layer2, Filecatalyst, and Sharepoint OneDrive, among other tools. Each failed for a variety of reasons. There were issues with slow and incomplete synchronization, file versioning, and even file corruption. 

“These tools caused many problems. Prior to Resilio, life in IT was not so good for me, personally,” says Guidolin. “Our IT team is the first line of defense. When an error happens, many people, including our CEO, are not happy. We faced a very difficult time before Resilio.”

Solution

Following a successful proof-of-concept (POC), Maffeis Engineering selected Resilio Connect as their preferred solution. Resilio Connect is a software-only, centrally managed, agent-based solution. Resilio agents are managed centrally using the Resilio Connect management console. Resilio Connect runs on both physical systems and virtual machines. It’s cross-platform, running on popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and NAS systems.  

The solution enables highly reliable real-time collaboration across multiple sites using hybrid infrastructure. Multiple users across multiple sites can make changes that are instantly and efficiently propagated to everyone.
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Resilio Connect offers several key capabilities that appeal to Maffeis Engineering:

• Real-time synchronization: Changes made to files are instantly propagated to all authorized devices, ensuring team members have the latest versions.
  

• WAN-optimized file transfers: Resilio Connect utilizes its proprietary, UDP-based Zero Gravity Transport (ZGT) to enable high-speed transfers, for large files or files of any size, to enable predictable file delivery times across all endpoints and locations.
  

• Robust security and data integrity: Data is protected and encrypted end-to-end, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of sensitive project files.
  

• Organic scalability: Resilio Connect can seamlessly handle the synchronization needs of large-scale projects with numerous team members and external collaborators. Resilio scales to many millions of files per job—across many endpoints and locations concurrently.
  

Iperceramica Headquarters, Italy

Guidolin was impressed with Resilio Connect. He runs Resilio Connect agents natively on existing NAS storage from QNAP. He only wants to replicate a subset of the data—and Resilio makes this extremely easy. During the POC, the IT team installed the Resilio Connect management console in Italy and remote agents in Dubai and the other remote sites.

Results

“After one month of testing and validation, Resilio Connect solved all of our problems,” says Guidolin. “The upload, download, and synchronization performance was very fast—exponentially faster than our previous solutions. We like being able to track, monitor, and automate all of our synchronization jobs centrally from our headquarters in Solagna.” 

Based on their initial success, the IT team continued to expand the Resilio deployment. “First we decided to purchase agents for our remote teams in Riyadh. They manage very large files and many files. Resilio makes configuration very simple. You can see if the job is running and the status. Then we decided to also sync our internal projects with our Milan offices. We purchased another QNAP NAS and Resilio agent for that office and licensed the UDP-based WAN optimization feature (ZGT) to speed up working on remote projects. 

“Resilio is transformative for us. Once Resilio Connect was set up, everything just worked.” Guidolin appreciates the improved reliability, faster performance, and optimal bandwidth utilization: “In one project we are constantly synchronizing 2TBs error-free across the WAN. Their bandwidth fluctuates for each office: some have very slow speeds and others, like Milan, have faster speeds. “We use the bandwidth scheduler to allocate and manage bandwidth for all transfers across all of our offices.”

Resilio can use either TCP or UDP. For WAN transfers, Resilio overcomes latency and loss to provide Guidolin and his team predictability: We know how long transfers will take. It’s also exponentially faster than our previous solutions.

“Our criteria is speed based on projects and file types. Being able to have work on the same project file in different sites in a very fast way is a big win for us,” says Guidolin.  “We like the ease of management and automation.” Emanuele Guidolin, Maffeis Engineering IT Manager

“We like the ease of management and automation.” By eliminating manual file sharing and sync processes, the Maffeis Engineering team can work from anywhere, trusting that the most current version of the project is always ready, on time—all the time.

Another area where Resilio excelled is global support. “We get a quick response and resolve problems fast if they arise. We usually get responses within an hour or two. We have all the support we need—and in a fast way,” adds Guidolin.

Summary

Maffeis Engineering's adoption of Resilio Connect has transformed their ability to share and collaborate across sites in real-time—on mission-critical projects. By replacing inefficient manual processes with Resilio Connect, the company experiences significant improvements in workflow efficiency, project sharing, and real-time collaboration across sites.

In summary, Maffeis Engineering appreciates benefits such as:

• Predictability: Feeling confident knowing that updates will be received by all team members in a timely manner, irrespective of their location.
  

• Faster delivery times: The company overcomes latency across sites to synchronize assets of any size and type 5-10x faster than previous solutions.
  

• Precision updates in real-time: Multiple team members instantly see changes to architectural project files in seconds across all locations.
  

• Data integrity preservation: Resilio Connect protects and preserves data integrity for all files, across all locations.
  

• Reduced TCO: Maffeis Engineering leverages existing NAS, eliminates unnecessary storage and minimizes data transfer across the WAN.
  

• Improved productivity: The time saved by team members through streamlined collaboration and file sharing translated into increased productivity and flexibility—and the ability to produce more within fixed time frames under deadline pressure.
  

S. Stefano Winery, Italy

“Using Resilio Connect we’ve taken multi-site collaboration to the next level,” adds Guidolin. “We’ve seen another world of improvement. Resilio has made a very big difference for us.”Emanuele Guidolin, Maffeis Engineering IT Manager