Aerospace Manufacturer

Aerospace Manufacturer Moves Backups to Cloud.

CLIENT CASE STUDY

THE CHALLENGE

Founded in 1998, this aerospace manufacturer specializes in engineering, development and testing of turbine and propulsion systems for military and commercial aircraft. The company is based in Jupiter, Florida and has grown to more than 250 employees in the United States, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom and Germany.

The company operates a global IT infrastructure entirely from its headquarters location. The IT Director relies on a small, highly efficient team to support the company’s approximate 450 end points, along with all the added security and compliance documentation that accompanies being an aerospace contractor to the U.S. government.

Keeping up across international time zones is a daily challenge and the IT team relies on a long-standing relationship with Greyson Technologies to help manage the company’s worldwide infrastructure, routing and switching, security and voice systems.

Over the years, the IT team’s reliance on Tivoli Storage Manager (now Spectrum Protect) for backup and recovery had become particularly burdensome at multiple levels. The IT Director advises that “the Tivoli system required a full-time contractor to operate and maintain, as well as an off-site tape backup and rotation service for disaster recovery.”

While the system was compliant, “it was costly and inefficient,” continued the IT Director, “with a single point of failure, and being very complex to operate. You either know the Tivoli language or you don’t.”

THE SOLUTION

Greyson was intimately aware of the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) dilemma as part of its on-going services to the aerospace manufacturer, and knew there was an opportunity for improvement and cost savings with a cloud-based alternative from its partner, Rubrik (Palo Alto, CA). Greyson presented the system replacement opportunity to the IT Director, who was immediately open to the idea having already started his own research into TSM alternatives.

Greyson arranged a demo of the Rubrik technology. “The entire solution came together quickly,” recalls the IT Director. “We had a few brief technical calls following the demo to flesh out our specific requirements, and at that point our expectation was the Rubrik solution would replace 90% of what we were doing with Tivoli on day one.”

Greyson and Rubrik worked closely with the aerospace manufacturer’s IT team to finalize their initial requirements and installed the cloud-based backup and recovery system in about half a day. Within a few hours, the IT team was hands-on and already targeting systems for backup.

THE RESULTS

As expected, the Greyson/Rubrik solution was able to immediately replace 90% of the aerospace manufacturer’s Tivoli environment. Additionally, the move to a cloud-based solution also reduced the IT team’s full reliance on tape backups and off-site services for disaster recovery.

With the initial phase of the solution fully operational, the company’s IT team is currently undertaking a capacity upgrade that will enable it to reclaim the remaining 10% still managed by Tivoli. At 100% capacity, the aerospace manufacturer will have achieved the following goals:

• Cost reduction of 1 FTE consultant to manage Tivoli
• Cost reduction of tape backup systems
• Cost reduction for off-site tape backup and rotation services