Rockwell Collins: Page 3 of 4

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.