About Williams Southern
Williams Southern is a well-established construction company with over 40 years of experience delivering reliable and innovative projects.
As part of a broader digital transformation, the company recently undertook a strategic review of its IT infrastructure to align with evolving business needs, reduce costs, and simplify on-premises operations following a significant shift to cloud services.
The Challenge: Ageing Hardware
Williams Southern’s existing infrastructure was built on Dell VRTX servers running VMware vSphere. While the environment remained stable and manageable, the hardware had reached the end of its compatibility lifecycle with VMware, and licensing costs were no longer favourable for a small business.
Additionally, the company’s move to cloud-hosted services had reduced the need for high-performance on-premises servers and shared storage. Their SonicWall NSA2650 firewall was also approaching end-of-support, prompting a review of network security and configuration.
The Solution: Go Lean
Williams Southern partnered with Nexus to implement a leaner, more cost-effective infrastructure that would support their cloud-first strategy while maintaining essential on-prem services.
Key actions included:
Server Platform Transition
Ageing infrastructure was replaced with Dell PowerEdge R360 servers running Proxmox VE to reduce costs, simplify management, and support a smaller on-premises footprint.
Resilient Configuration
To support high availability across the two Proxmox hosts, a Corosync qDevice was deployed on repurposed workstation hardware. This provided quorum for cluster resilience, helping mitigate split-brain scenarios and enabling seamless maintenance.
Firewall Replacement and Optimisation
The SonicWall NSA2650 was replaced with a TZ470 appliance. This upgrade allowed for a full review and optimisation of firewall rules and configuration, improving security posture and management clarity without introducing unnecessary complexity.
The Outcome
Williams Southern partnered with Nexus to implement a leaner, more cost-effective infrastructure that would support their cloud-first strategy while maintaining essential on-prem services.
Key actions included:
Cost-Effective Infrastructure
By moving to Proxmox VE and retiring VMware licensing, Williams Southern achieved significant cost savings while retaining full control over their virtual environment. The new hardware meets current needs without overprovisioning, reflecting a right-sized approach to infrastructure.
Simplified Management
The Proxmox platform offers straightforward VM management, snapshotting, and ZFSbased
storage replication between hosts. This has reduced administrative overhead and improved operational resilience.
Security and Supportability
The new firewall setup is cleaner and more maintainable, with configurations aligned
to best practices. The move away from end-of-support hardware ensures continued
vendor support and security updates.
Cloud-First Alignment
With much of the company’s infrastructure now cloud-hosted, the on-prem environment has been streamlined to support only essential services such as DNS, DHCP, monitoring, and a small number of application VMs. This hybrid model supports future growth while keeping complexity and cost in check.
What’s Next
“Nexus understood our goals…”
Williams Southern now operates a lean, secure, and manageable IT environment that reflects their evolving business needs. With the support of Nexus, they’ve transitioned to a platform that’s better suited to their scale and strategy, ensuring continued reliability and flexibility as they grow.
Working with Nexus enabled us to realign our IT infrastructure to better reflect our operational needs and future direction. The move to Proxmox VE was driven by hardware compatibility and licensing considerations, especially as we’ve transitioned many services to the cloud.
Nexus understood our goals and helped us implement a streamlined, resilient setup that’s easier to manage and maintain. Their team handled the transition professionally, and we now have a reliable environment that supports our essential local infrastructure and ongoing business growth.
Rob Taylor, IT Manager, Williams Southern
Find Out More
Download the WillIams Southern case study here, for keeping and sharing.
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