How Lapham-Hickey Steel Improved File Availability and Disaster Resilience with Resilio Active Everywhere

Founded in 1926, Lapham-Hickey Steel is a Midwest-based steel service center and fabrication company approaching its 100th year in business. From its headquarters in the Chicago area, the company operates multiple facilities, including branches in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio, providing steel distribution, coil processing, and custom fabrication services to manufacturers across the region.

Capabilities like laser cutting, plasma cutting, forming, welding, and machining allow Lapham-Hickey to transform raw steel into precisely engineered components. These manufacturing operations depend on CAD and CAM design files that customers upload through a secure portal or email directly to the company. From the file server, those drawings feed directly into CNC machines on the shop floor.

File servers are the starting point for everything Lapham-Hickey manufactures. Customer drawings live there, and those drawings drive the machines.

Like many multi-site manufacturers, Lapham-Hickey faced a fundamental infrastructure risk: each branch relied on a local file server, which was a single point of failure. To improve resilience, Systems Administrator Matt White explored Microsoft Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) to maintain synchronized copies of production data across locations.

In practice, DFSR fell short. Replication was unpredictable, with noticeable delays even for small files. Monitoring was limited to generating XML health reports that offered little actionable detail. There was no dashboard, no real-time visibility, and no reliable way to confirm whether files had actually arrived at the destination.

“With DFSR, you’d put a file on the server and just sit there waiting for it to show up somewhere else. You didn’t really know what it was doing or why it was taking so long.” Matt White, Systems Administrator at Lapham-Hickey Steel

The lack of transparency made DFSR impossible to trust for disaster recovery. White shelved the project and fell back on off-site backups, accepting that downtime after a failure was the cost of doing business.

That changed when a RAID array failure destroyed an entire file server at one of Lapham-Hickey's branch locations. The outage immediately took terabytes of production data offline, including the CAD drawings and job documentation the branch needed to run active manufacturing operations.

The IT team turned to their third-party backup provider for recovery, only to discover that the provider had not been properly monitoring the backups, and the most recent available copy was already a week old.

“That branch had around three terabytes of data, and restoring it over that connection took a while. During that time, we were missing files we needed for certain jobs, and even some documents required for billing.” Matt White, Systems Administrator at Lapham-Hickey Steel

The incident exposed a critical gap. Traditional backup-and-restore was too slow. The team didn't just need backup. They needed a continuously updated replica that could serve as an immediate failover when a branch server went down.

With DFSR ruled out, White returned to researching alternatives. Browsing sysadmin forums and Reddit, he kept seeing Resilio recommended as a DFSR replacement. He contacted Resilio to start an evaluation.

Before deploying anything in production, White built a full test environment: a small lab server running virtual machines with a simulated VPN tunnel to replicate the company’s multi-site topology. He loaded a copy of a production file server and began testing with real-world files, NTFS permissions, and live edits.

“It was a pretty quick setup, and it did exactly what I wanted it to do. I was making real-time file changes, uploading big files and small ones, and just watching them replicate back and forth.” Matt White, Systems Administrator at Lapham-Hickey Steel

The difference from DFSR was immediate. Files appeared on the destination server almost instantly. The Resilio management console provided real-time visibility into every transfer.

After validating the platform in testing, Lapham-Hickey deployed Resilio Active Everywhere across its operations. The architecture is straightforward: two branch file servers replicate continuously to corporate headquarters, maintaining an always-current disaster recovery copy. In the other direction, key drawing repositories replicate from headquarters out to branch locations so production teams have fast, local access to the files they need.

The system uses DFS Namespaces to transparently map drive letters, so end users experience no change to their workflow. When a local server goes down, the namespace redirects to the replicated copy at another site, delivering the seamless failover that DFSR never could.

Today, Resilio continuously synchronizes approximately 3 TB of production CAD and manufacturing data between Lapham-Hickey Steel's branch locations and corporate headquarters. Two branch file servers replicate back to headquarters to maintain an up-to-date disaster recovery copy, while key drawing repositories replicate outward so production teams always have fast local access.

From day one, files that previously took minutes to appear at the destination arrived almost instantly. And instead of generating XML reports and hoping for the best, White can monitor every transfer in real time through the Resilio management console. That visibility, White says, makes all the difference.

That trust was tested recently when a networking issue caused the company's backup system to stop capturing data from one of the branch file servers. While the backup team worked through the problem, Resilio kept synchronizing normally in the background.

"When the backups stopped again because of a networking issue, Resilio was still running. At least we knew we had an up-to-date copy of the files at headquarters." Matt White, Systems Administrator at Lapham-Hickey Steel

Throughout onboarding, White worked with the same Resilio team from evaluation through production deployment, which meant he never had to re-explain his setup or goals. He described the support as extremely helpful and appreciated the continuity of working with people who already understood his environment.

After the initial configuration, the system has required almost no ongoing maintenance. For a lean IT team managing infrastructure across multiple locations, simplicity matters.

"The setup and configuration were really quick, and honestly, I haven't had to touch it since. It just works." Matt White, Systems Administrator at Lapham-Hickey Steel

Following the success of its initial deployment, Lapham-Hickey Steel plans to expand Resilio to additional branch locations and file servers. The next phase will bring another CAD-heavy fabrication branch into the replication topology, giving that facility both local file access and centralized disaster recovery protection.

For White and his team, the platform has already proven its value as a foundation they can build on incrementally, adding locations and use cases as the business requires without adding complexity.

Manufacturing doesn't wait for file transfers to finish or backup restores to complete. Resilio helps IT teams keep production data synchronized and available across every location, so operations move at the speed the business demands.

Ready to move faster? Schedule a demo to learn how Resilio can improve your environment.