Rockwell Collins

There's surely a secret fellowship of SAN managers who feel so frustrated with the complexity and the cost of storage networks that they've wanted to rip out all of the equipment and start over. Rockwell Collins Inc., a $2.5 billion aviation electronics company, has done just that. And the best part is that the company hasn't had to buy a single piece of new equipment to replace the old gear.

The company has almost completed the process of consolidating more than 40 separate storage systems onto only five new EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) systems, which, it says, it hasn't actually purchased. Instead, Rockwell Collins is leasing 22 Tbytes of capacity on Symmetrix DMX800 and Clariion CX600 boxes (see Rockwell Collins Picks EMC). In all, the company has 47 Tbytes on EMC gear.

"The biggest thing about this deal is that we didn't buy anything," says Ed Malamut, the manager of business applications systems at Rockwell Collins.

The Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based company didn't even have to look around for a buyer for its existing systems. EMC purchased the whole lot -- including both EMC gear and non-EMC gear -- for an undisclosed amount. "They wrote us a check," Malamut says. (He also wouldn't reveal the financial terms of the company's lease arrangement with EMC.)

An EMC spokeswoman says that the company has been offering this refinancing option to its customers for several years, and that it remarkets both the EMC and non-EMC systems once it has bought them.About 18 months ago, Rockwell Collins decided that its storage setup was too expensive and too complex, and started developing a strategy to move toward "utility-based computing." The company decided it didn't want to own any of the storage assets itself, but wanted to pay only for what it actually used.

Before it began the consolidation process, Rockwell Collins's storage solution comprised more than 40 locally attached storage systems and servers -- mainly from Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) -- and an EMC SAN hosting the SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP) R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. This became expensive and complex, Malamut says, because of the need to provision extra capacity for each system.

"You thought you might need 70 [Gbytes], so you bought 100," he says. "We owned all of these servers and all of this storage. We had to pay maintenance on them."

The company has almost completed the consolidation of its storage system and is now in the second phase of its plan, which includes consolidating most of its servers as well. Malamut says he expects to complete the second phase within weeks. "Our goal is to have this utility-based system across the board."

EMC has provided frames to Rockwell Collins that are fully populated with disk, but only the disks that are needed are turned on. "If we need more disk, we call EMC and say we need you to turn on X amount of storage."While Rockwell Collins still has to provision excess capacity for failover, it's much less than before, Malamut claims. The new EMC systems also offer better performance than the systems the company was using before. Over the next three years, the company expects to see a 44 percent return on investment.

In addition, the company says it has already cut its storage management expenditures by 45 percent, due to a greatly simplified storage infrastructure and the use of EMC's ControlCenter management tools. Prior to the consolidation, Malamut says, the firm had people in a number of different storage teams to take care of different equipment and applications. Now, he says, the company has created a single storage team and has been able to shave three or four people off its storage staff.

When it started looking around for the best storage solution, Rockwell Collins realized that while most storage vendors were talking the talk, many were not yet walking the walk. "A year ago, not all the vendors were on the same page. EMC had what we needed."

More important, perhaps, Rockwell Collins was an standing EMC customer. The company's ERP system, which held the greatest amount of its storage, ran on EMC's boxes. This meant that migrating to other EMC systems was easier than moving to a non-EMC solution, especially since EMC agreed to migrate the data from its own systems to the new ones. However, Rockwell Collins had to do the rest of the migrations itself -- one box at a time.

But EMC's storage-on-demand program isn't perfect. While EMC simplified the data migration and has allowed Rockwell Collins to cut complexity and costs from its storage setup, Malamut points out that the vendor still has a ways to go before it nails down how to best offer storage-on-demand. While it's very easy to scale up capacity, EMC has not yet provided a way for companies to scale down if their storage needs should decline, he says.And scaling up can also pose problems. When a frame is full, EMC brings in a new one. For each new frame, Rockwell Collins has to purchase a minimum amount of storage space. That's obviously not his preference, but Malamut concedes, "The realities of their business are the realities." [Ed. note: Or, as a wise man once said: The "C" in EMC doesn't stand for "charity."]

Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch