Manufacturer to Reduce IT Costs by $2.

5
Million with Hybrid Cloud Storage

Overview "We’ve reduced storage costs by 80 percent, or $2.5

Customer: Textron
Customer Website: www.textron.com million, by moving data into Microsoft Azure using
Customer Size: 32,000 employees
StorSimple, which helped us meet our targeted IT
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—Aerospace budget reductions.”
and defense
David Ginn, Director of Architecture, Textron Information Services, Textron

Customer Profile In response to increasing storage costs, Textron shifted to

Textron is a highly diversified company
that makes aircraft, military intelligence
Microsoft hybrid cloud storage based on Microsoft Azure and
products, and industrial and consumer Microsoft Azure StorSimple. By using cloud-based storage,
products. The Providence, Rhode Island-
based firm employs 32,000 people in 25
Textron will reduce annual storage costs by US$2.5 million and
countries. gain rapid and cost-effective storage scalability. Textron has also
Business Situation
gained a cost-effective disaster recovery solution that shortens
Textron needed to reduce rising storage data access time from 72 hours to minutes.
costs and ensure that it was getting the
best possible value from its storage
budget.

Solution
Textron shifted to hybrid cloud storage
using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft
Azure StorSimple.

Benefits
 Reduce storage costs by US$2.5 million
annually
 Gain storage scalability
 Improve data availability

“We had data that was
past its useful life taking
up space on all our core
storage platforms, and
we wanted to move this
older data to a cheaper
storage solution.”
Les Rowland, Chief Architect of
Architecture, Textron Information
Services, Textron
Situation
Founded in 1923, Providence, Rhode
Island-based Textron is known around the
world for its powerful aircraft brands, such
as Bell Helicopter and Cessna Aircraft
Company. But it also makes golf cars, wire
and cable installation systems, turf-care
products, automotive parts, and military
intelligence products. Textron not only
spans multiple industries, but it is also
known as a pioneer of the diversified
business model. Textron is a US$12.1 billion
company with 32,000 employees. Its global
network of businesses includes Bell
Helicopter, E-Z-GO, Greenlee, Jacobsen,
Kautex, Textron Aviation, Textron Financial,
and Textron Systems.
Like many companies, Textron is looking
for ways to improve services while lowering
IT costs. “We had a sizeable IT cost
reduction to go after—about 15 percent of
our budget—and we knew that storage was
a large portion of our midrange costs,” says
David Ginn, Director of Architecture,
Textron Information Service at Textron.
“However, our storage was growing at a
rate of more than 30 percent a year. Many
Textron companies had experienced data
growth because of major projects and
organic business expansion.”
Textron Information Services wanted to
support the expanding storage needs of
the business by ensuring that Textron was
getting the best possible value from its
storage expenditures and that it was using
the most innovative technologies. “We had
data that was past its useful life taking up
space on all our core storage platforms,
and we wanted to move this older data to a
cheaper storage solution,” adds Les
Rowland, Chief Architect of Architecture,
Textron Information Services at Textron.
“We wanted to ensure that each type of
data was stored as cost-effectively as
possible.”
Solution
The search for a cost-effective storage
solution led Textron to cloud-based
options. Because it was an active supplier
to the defense industry, Textron could not
move to a cloud-only storage strategy
because of data security requirements to
keep certain data on-premises. However, it
could move to a hybrid cloud storage
solution.
“Two years ago, we wouldn’t even be
having a conversation about cloud data
storage because it was deemed too risky
for a company in our industry,” Ginn says.
“But with all the advances in cloud
technology and the many companies
making the move to the cloud, we began to
seriously look at putting not only data but
applications in the cloud.”
Choose FedRAMP-Certified Solution
After narrowing its search to Microsoft and
Amazon Web Services, Textron selected
hybrid cloud storage from Microsoft. The
solution was based on Microsoft Azure
StorSimple cloud-integrated storage, an
on-premises enterprise storage area
network (SAN) from Microsoft that
interoperates with Microsoft Azure to
provide a hybrid cloud storage solution for
primary, backup, archive, and disaster
recovery. Microsoft Azure is a cloud
platform that provides on-demand
compute, storage, content delivery, and
networking capabilities from Microsoft
datacenters.
“We liked the simplicity of StorSimple,”
Rowland says. “Amazon’s solution just
didn’t have the features and enterprise
storage capabilities that StorSimple offered,
nor did it have the level of cloud and on-
premises integration that Microsoft
provided. We didn’t like the idea of piecing
together different products.”
Another key factor for Textron was the
ability to meet industry regulations. Weeks
earlier, in September 2013, Microsoft Azure
had become the first public cloud platform
to receive a Provisional Authority to
Operate from the FedRAMP Joint
Authorization Board (JAB) for both its
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infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and
platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. The
Federal Risk and Authorization
Management Program (FedRAMP) is a US
government-wide program that provides a
standardized approach to security
assessment, authorization, and continuous
monitoring for cloud products and services.
The JAB is the primary governance group of
the FedRAMP program, consisting of the
chief information officers of the
Department of Defense, the Department of
Homeland Security, and the US General
Services Administration.
Deploy Hybrid Cloud Storage Solution
Textron purchased four StorSimple units
and US$300,000 worth of Microsoft Azure
Storage. Microsoft Services Consulting was
onsite to help with the first
implementation, but Ginn and his team
were able to do most of the work
unassisted. “It was an incredibly easy
process to set up StorSimple, set up our
Azure account, configure the storage, and
bring it online,” he says.
Textron is using StorSimple and Microsoft
Azure as primary storage for all
unstructured data. StorSimple employs a
three-tiered architecture whereby it puts
more frequently used data on high-speed
local drives and less frequently used and
older data on less expensive cloud storage
(Microsoft Azure).
By the end of 2014, Textron will have about
300 terabytes of data in Azure.
Benefits
By adopting a hybrid cloud storage
solution from Microsoft, Textron will be
able to reduce storage costs by $2.5 million
annually and gain storage scalability.
Textron also experiences faster data
recovery in the event of a server or
datacenter failure.
Reduce Storage Costs by $2.5 Million
Annually, Increase Scalability
By shifting data storage to StorSimple and
Microsoft Azure, Textron was able to easily
meet its storage cost reduction goals.
“We’ve reduced storage costs by 80
percent, or $2.5 million, by moving data
into Microsoft Azure using StorSimple,
which helped us meet our targeted IT
budget reductions,” Ginn says.
Textron can also scale storage more easily
to help IT keep pace with the increasing
velocity of the business.
Improve Data Availability
In its previous IT environment, Textron
Information Services performed full
backups and then replicated data to its
disaster recovery location. In a disaster
recovery scenario, it could take 48 to 72
hours to bring systems back online. By
using multiple StorSimple units in a disaster
recovery configuration, access to data is
nearly immediate.
“There was no way we could deliver
disaster recovery at the size or scale that
Microsoft can,” Rowland says. “”We could
never manage the capital investment or the
processes that Microsoft has in place. We’re
happy to let Microsoft innovate and bring
new datacenter service offerings to the
table so that we can focus on running our
business.”
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For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 426-
9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-
2495. Customers in the United States and
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Textron
products and services, visit the website
at:
www.textron.com
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published October 2014
Transform the datacenter
The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms
the datacenter by extending existing
investments in skills and technology with
public cloud services and a common set of
management tools. With an on-premises
infrastructure connected to the Microsoft
Azure platform, you can deliver services
faster and scale up or down quickly to meet
changing needs.
For more information about transforming
the datacenter, go to:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/
cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx
Software and Services  Services
 Microsoft Azure − Microsoft Services Consulting
− Microsoft Azure Storage
 Solutions
− Microsoft Azure StorSimple
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