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."
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