Radius Recycling is one of North America’s largest manufacturers and exporters of recycled metal products. In addition to operating large recycling facilities and its own steel mills, Radius also runs 50 Pick-n-Pull lots across the United States and Canada. These allow people to sell old cars, and customers to procure the recycled or salvaged components.
Originally, this part of the business leveraged a legacy VDI provider and was heavily reliant on old servers running on Windows 2008 to host a number of custom applications developed in-house. This created endless challenges not only for IT, but all of the employees. It was breaking so often Radius felt it was completely unstable and untenable. So eventually their dev team began the process of migrating the main SQL server that supports Pick-n-Pull’s mission critical apps over to Azure.
However, Joel Brown, Cloud System Engineer at Radius Recycling was the only IT employee tasked with rebuilding said apps from scratch and deploying them on Windows 10. It quickly became an overwhelmingly tedious and inefficient process.
“The first time I went through the deployment process was such a pain and took up so much time,” noted Brown. “I was working lots of nights and weekends on what essentially became my pet project. It frequently consisted of pushing a button, waiting around for something to happen, and then making more updates – definitely not the best use of my time.”
Putting the Pedal to the Metal on Deployments
Following the initial frustration Brown experienced, he was perusing The Azure Academy’s YouTube channel when he discovered Nerdio Manager for Enterprise in a video talking about how to best support the Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) deployment process.
“I had never heard of Nerdio before, but once I saw the Azure Academy tutorial, I knew I needed to do a deeper dive to see if the product was as amazing as it seemed,” Brown mentioned. “I connected with someone at Nerdio who walked me through all of the functionality and got me started with our proof of concept (POC) stage. I had no idea at the time how invaluable this platform would become for our operations at Radius.”
During the initial POC, Brown was hesitant about ceding control and letting Nerdio Manager automate so much. But after creating a small test environment in AVD, he immediately saw and experienced how easy the platform was to trust. Brown quickly integrated Nerdio into Radius’s dev UAT (user application testing) and production environments, before rolling out fully to manage its 500 monthly active AVD users.
“I couldn’t imagine managing an AVD environment without Nerdio Manager for Enterprise,” stated Brown. “Even though I had some fears about the ‘set and forget’ feature of the platform, once I saw it in action, I not only became a believer, but an evangelist for Nerdio throughout the organization.”
Nerdio is a Steel (Pun Intended)
When discussing the need for Nerdio Manager with his boss, Brown met no resistance after he explained how seamlessly it would integrate into the existing Azure infrastructure and billing. There was no need to go through the elaborate procurement process typical with a new vendor because Nerdio Manager is installed directly from the Azure Marketplace into the customer’s tenant. Additionally, when used correctly, Nerdio cost savings easily outweigh the monthly costs and seamlessly integrate into Azure billing. “You won’t even notice it on the Azure bill,” Brown added.
From there, setup was a breeze with the expert resources and support from the Nerdio team.
“Everyone at Nerdio was incredibly knowledgeable, friendly, and technically savvy. I could tell the person that helped with onboarding had done this many times before, and had an answer for everything,” said Brown. “I’ve worked with many other vendors in a similar capacity and the responses I usually get to issues are more along the lines of ‘Wow, I’ve never seen this before.’”
All subsequent questions that Brown has emailed to Nerdio support have been responded to quickly and thoroughly, helping him to fully understand both this issue at hand and the fix. Not only has Nerdio been incredibly responsive, but also proactive in its engagements with partners. Customer Success Managers regularly reach out with the offer to do remote health checks, analysis of the environment to ensure everything is optimally configured, et cetera.
More Green Across the Board
The efficacy of Nerdio Manager for Enterprise not only made the deployment of custom apps on Azure much simpler, but also lowers Radius’s carbon footprint and saves the company money.
An organization with sustainability in its DNA, Radius Recycling is dedicated to creating a low carbon future. By leveraging Nerdio, IT is able to automatically scale compute to match usage, thereby drastically reducing unnecessary carbon expenditure.
On top of the environmental impact, Radius also saves approximately $3,000 a month in compute, and incalculable man hours, due to Nerdio’s automation of much of the tedious administrative work associated with managing Azure.
”Now most of my interactions in the Nerdio platform consist of a single click. It has made dealing with AVD and Azure an ancillary task that no longer detracts from my primary responsibilities,” boasted Brown. “Nerdio Manager for Enterprise easily saves four to six hours of work on any given deployment, which quickly compounds over time.”
Enabling Core Business Operations
Radius as an organization has acquired a number of companies over the years to bolster its customer offerings and drive innovation. Since its onboarding, Nerdio Manager and AVD have been instrumental in ensuring a smooth integration of the new employees and systems as the company continues to grow and expand.
Currently, Radius Recycling manages its 500+ monthly active users on AVD with Nerdio, and the response from employees has been a resounding sigh of relief. They no longer face the same challenges with the previous UX, the help desk is no longer drowning in related requests, and the employees accessing third-party apps hosted on AVD noticed the improvement in performance immediately.
“My only regret is not having heard of Nerdio sooner,” concluded Brown. “Deploying with Nerdio from the beginning is the only way to go and will save you so many headaches both in the short and long terms.”
