When Modernizing Core Infrastructure and Investing in AI Are the Same Decision

Key takeaways: Dunaway, a 70-year-old Texas engineering firm, replaced aging VDI infrastructure with Dell PowerStore and PowerEdge—eliminating $200K in downtime losses, cutting VM spin-up time by 77% and building a platform ready for whatever comes next.

If you’re an IT leader right now, you’re probably navigating a version of the same conversation: the business wants AI capabilities on the horizon, but the infrastructure running today’s operations still needs attention. The budget pressure is real. So is the expectation that you’ll somehow do both.

Here’s what we’re seeing from organizations that are getting this right: they stopped treating core modernization and AI readiness as competing priorities. For them, the decision to fix the foundation was the decision to prepare for what’s next.

Dunaway’s story is a good one to know

The Texas-based engineering and professional services firm has been shaping communities for 70 years. Their work—civil and structural engineering, landscape architecture, subsurface utility mapping—runs on large, complex files, real-time collaboration across offices and job sites and virtual desktops that engineers depend on to bill hours and meet deadlines. When that infrastructure slows down, the business slows down. When it goes down, the losses are immediate and measurable.

For years, a legacy VDI environment was doing exactly that. Engineers running graphics-heavy workloads experienced delays that ate into productivity and billable hours. The firm needed to fix it—not patch it.

Dunaway partnered with Dell Technologies and Virtualizen to rebuild around Dell PowerStore and PowerEdge servers equipped with NVIDIA GPUs. The results were immediate. VM spin-up time dropped from 90 seconds to 20. VM creation accelerated by 25%. The firm achieved zero downtime for 200+ consecutive days and eliminated $200K in downtime-related losses. PowerStore’s data reduction performance came in at a 13:3 effective rate—well above the 5:1 guarantee—while cutting the storage footprint by 75% and reducing power and cooling consumption by 50%.

“PowerStore isn’t just storage—it’s the engine that keeps our engineers productive and our projects on schedule,” said Russel Moos, Director of IT at Dunaway.

But here’s the part that matters most for where enterprise IT is heading: Dunaway didn’t just solve today’s problem. They built a platform with the performance headroom, operational efficiency and architectural flexibility to support AI-driven insights, predictive analytics and smarter resource planning as those capabilities mature.

That’s the pattern worth paying attention to. The organizations building AI-ready infrastructure aren’t necessarily the ones chasing AI-specific point solutions. They’re the ones investing in platforms that can run everything—current workloads and emerging ones—without forcing a choice between the two.

If your team is wrestling with aging infrastructure while keeping one eye on AI, Dunaway’s experience is worth a closer look.

• • Read the full Dunaway case study to see how they built it.

• • 5 Ways Dell PowerStore Helps Businesses Simplify Storage While Scaling for Growth—Read the white paper
  • Explore Dell PowerStore and Dell PowerEdge to understand what the platform looks like for your environment.