Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing—Healthcare
Customer Profile
GF Health Products is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and distributors of medical products, marketing internationally recognized brands in 84 countries.
Business Situation
GF Health was running out of storage and having trouble meeting the IT needs of its diverse business units. It also knew that it needed a disaster recovery solution but was concerned about costs.
Solution
GF Health embraced a Microsoft hybrid cloud computing model to run core applications in an on-premises private cloud and Windows Azure for storage, development servers, and disaster recovery.
Benefits
Nearly limitless storage, increased savings
More time to serve the business
Improved agility, scalability
Cost-effective disaster recovery / “The great thing about StorSimple and Windows Azure is that we no longer have to buy storage every year or worry about running out. That delivers incredible peace of mind to me and to management.”
Scott Lerner, Director of Information Technology, GF Health Products
GF Health Products is a fast-growing medical equipment manufacturer adept at using technology to speed up its business. However, a number of new technology systems caused data volumes to grow, and the company began to run out of storage space. It turned to Microsoft partner Intellinet to devise a hybrid cloud strategy. GF Health used Microsoft hybrid cloud storage to immediately expand storage, Windows Azure to provide cloud-based virtual machines for development and disaster recovery, and Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to fashion an on-premises private cloud environment. With this strategy, GF Health gained a nearly limitless pool of storage and freed its small IT staff to focus on solving business problems and speed server delivery. It also gained a cost-effective disaster recovery solution, which the business could never before afford.
Situation
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, GF Health Products, Inc. manufactures and distributes approximately 4,000 medical, rehabilitation, long-term care, and homecare products, including wheelchairs, seating solutions, hospital beds, surgical stretchers, diagnostic equipment, and exam treatment products. GF Health employs 300 people.
In 2008, GF Health used Microsoft SQL Server data management software, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and other Microsoft products to modernize its business by creating an online catalog and e-commerce web capability, deploying a customer relationship management system, and installing a business intelligence reporting system. This suite of digital systems helped GF Health sell more products, increase revenues, improve customer service and satisfaction, reduce customer service calls, and improve management reporting and decision making.
However, these systems generated new data, causing the company’s data volumes to grow exponentially. “Many of our customers are moving to a just-in-time inventory model, which means that instead of getting one order for 10 wheelchairs, we’ll get 10 orders for one wheelchair,” explains Scott Lerner, Director of Information Technology for GF Health Products. “We had many more transactions going through our systems and much more data being generated.”
Additionally, the company virtualized its server holdings in 2008, using the Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, which reduced server acquisition costs. However, all these datacenter changes and improvements contributed to increased use of the company’s expensive storage area network (SAN).
As GF Health continued to grow, overall data volumes related to product and order data continued to rise, as did its virtual machine storage needs. “It didn’t make sense to buy more servers every time we needed more storage,” Lerner says. “We were also reluctant to expand our expensive SAN.”
The nagging storage issue became a significant problem in mid-2013 when Lerner had to report to the management team that there was literally no room to install a warehouse management system, much less the data that it would generate. “For IT to stall a business initiative is not good,” Lerner says. “We’re here to enable, not block, business needs.”
Apart from the storage problems, the IT department was having increasing difficulty moving quickly enough to suit the business. “Our business units make products that are sold to very different customers, from small home healthcare companies to giant hospitals,” Lerner says. “We in IT have to be everything to all those business units, but it was very difficult to provide IT services that met so many different demands. The overall velocity of the business was increasing, and we needed to keep up or, better, stay in front of business needs.”
One such need was for a cost-effective disaster recovery solution. GF Health used the Data Protection Manager component of Microsoft System Center 2012 to back up files, so company data was protected, but GF Health had no protection against a natural disaster wiping out its datacenter. “Cash is very important to us, and spending a tremendous amount of money on a backup datacenter that might never be needed was a tough sell to management,” Lerner says.
Solution
Intellinet, a management consulting firm and member of the Microsoft Partner Network with multiple Gold and Silver competencies, recommended that GF Health Products upgrade to the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to evolve the company’s virtualized environment into a private cloud environment. In a private cloud environment, virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources are managed as a fluid computing “fabric” that can be configured and dynamically reconfigured in a highly automated fashion so that IT resources can be elastically expanded or contracted. By creating a private cloud environment, the IT department could more nimbly deploy IT services and keep up with business needs.
Intellinet also recommended that GF Health use StorSimple in combination with Windows Azure to cost-effectively meet its expanding storage needs and provide a disaster recovery solution. The StorSimple family of cloud-integrated storage solutions is an on-premises enterprise SAN that interoperates with Windows Azure to provide a hybrid cloud storage solution for primary, backup, archive, and disaster recovery. Windows Azure is a cloud platform that provides on-demand compute, storage, and networking capabilities from Microsoft datacenters.
Instantly Expand Storage in Cloud
While the private cloud environment would take a bit of time to create, GF Health began immediately to use Windows Azure and StorSimple to alleviate its storage concerns. “The more we learned about StorSimple and Windows Azure, the more we realized that they were a great fit for us,” Lerner says. “StorSimple helped us immediately solve our storage problem, and thanks to data deduplication and compression, we were able to use much less on-site StorSimple space than if we’d bought traditional hard disks. We’re seeing compression ratios of 2.5 times.This, combined with the fact that less-frequently used files are moved to the cloud, really preserves storage space.”
StorSimple employs a three-tiered architecture, placing frequently used data on high-speed solid-state drives, less-frequently used data on less expensive serial-attached SCSI drives, and rarely used data on the most cost-effective cloud tier. StorSimple also features data deduplication and compression, which reduces storage needs.
Microsoft representatives helped GF Health set up a StorSimple SAN and train its staff. Intellinet configured Hyper-V to recognize StorSimple as a new storage pool, and suddenly GF Health had a nearly endless supply of storage space available.
GF Health is using StorSimple for daily production storage, including Hyper-V virtual machine storage, backups, and archival. “StorSimple is just another storage device on our network,” Lerner says. “Employees do not know that their applications or files are being stored there versus another storage environment.”
GF Health can adjust how frequently and quickly StorSimple sends data to the cloud to preserve Internet bandwidth during business hours. The IT staff can configure StorSimple to send data to Windows Azure at full speed at night and to slow transfer speeds during the day.
Move Development and Disaster Recovery to Cloud
With the insight into Windows Azure gained from moving storage into the cloud, Lerner began to explore other ways to use the Microsoft cloud resource. “I quickly created a few virtual machines by using Windows Azure, and they looked and behaved like virtual machines running right here in our facility,” Lerner says. He also moved the company’s development environment to Windows Azure, which enables software developers to quickly access servers for test and development needs.
GF Health is working with Intellinet to develop a Windows Azure-based disaster recovery solution. Rather than build a backup datacenter, the company will use the Hyper-V Replica and Windows Azure virtual machine capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2 to populate backup systems in Windows Azure. It will also use Microsoft SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn and AlwaysOn Availability Groups to populate data in Windows Azure. AlwaysOn is an enhancement of database mirroring that supports as many as four secondary databases. An AlwaysOn Availability Group is a logical collection of databases that automatically fails over as one unit.
“In the future, if our datacenter disappears, we will have everything running in Windows Azure,” Lerner says. “All our systems will be replicated and can be brought up immediately in Windows Azure.”
Build Private Cloud Environment and Use Hybrid Cloud Computing
GF Health is working with Intellinet to fashion its virtualized datacenter into a private cloud environment. GF Health already owned and used System Center 2012 to manage and monitor its servers, but by upgrading to System Center 2012 R2, it can automate more of its datacenter. “We have a very small IT staff, and System Center 2012 R2 will let us extend our staff’s capabilities,” Lerner says. “We plan to use the Virtual Machine Manager component to automate more IT processes related to provisioning and allocating networking, compute, and storage resources. This will help us get out of the business of managing hardware and give us more time to focus on solving business problems.”
Also, by moving from virtualization to private cloud computing with Windows Server 2012 R2, GF Health can unlock the hybrid cloud benefits of Windows Azure—combining private and public cloud resources to deliver optimum business benefit. “Microsoft has a great cloud vision that really works for us,” Lerner says. “Our vision is to run core applications on-premises and use Windows Azure for storage, development, and disaster recovery. Managing all these servers across both on-premises and Windows Azure environments is challenging, but we will use System Center—hosted in Windows Azure—to manage the entire environment.”
Benefits
By adopting a hybrid cloud computing model, GF Health Products has gained nearly limitless storage capacity, extended the talents of its small IT staff through extensive automation, greatly accelerated the IT staff’s ability to respond to business needs, and cost-effectively provided a disaster recovery solution.
Nearly Limitless Storage, Increased Savings
GF Health was able to immediately remove its storage pain by using Microsoft hybrid cloud storage. “The great thing about StorSimple and Windows Azure is that we no longer have to buy storage every year or worry about running out,” Lerner says. “That delivers incredible peace of mind to me and to management.”
Additionally, GF Health can eliminate the need to ship backup tapes offsite using a third-party service, an instant US$10,000 a year savings.
More Time to Serve the Business
By taking full advantage of the automation capabilities of System Center 2012 R2, GF Health can automate processes that typically consumed hours of staff time. “We spend 80 percent of our time just doing daily system-check tasks and reacting to problems,” Lerner says. “By using System Center 2012 R2, we will be able to shift that time to proactively helping the business get the best use from its technology.” One such project is deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 as a companywide document-sharing and collaboration platform and possibly augmenting it with Microsoft SharePoint Online.
Improved Business Agility and Scalability
By using hybrid cloud computing, the GF Health IT staff can move faster and deploy servers and storage as soon as the business needs them. “With a hybrid cloud model, IT is no longer a bottleneck to the business,” Lerner says. “When we need new virtual machines, I can create them quickly in Windows Azure. Previously, when developers asked for test servers for a short period of time, we just refused those requests or we approved them and purchased servers that were soon sitting unused. Today, I can have a virtual machine running in Windows Azure by the time the requester gets back to his or her desk and release it as soon as they’re done with it.”
The ability to rapidly scale servers on demand delivers huge benefit to the business. “Our warehouse management rollout was delayed by four months because we had no place to install the application,” Lerner says. “That will never happen again. With Windows Azure as a resource, we have IT on tap for the business.”
Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Solution
GF Health gained an enterprise-class disaster recovery solution without the cost of building a second datacenter. It currently takes days or weeks to recover data from offsite tapes, but the company will soon be able to recover applications and data in minutes by using Windows Azure as a backup site.
“Windows Azure puts disaster recovery within the reach of nearly every small and midsize business,” Lerner says. “Disaster protection was never a priority for management, so we kept putting it off year after year. Sooner or later it would have caught up with us. With Windows Azure, we’re spending pennies on the dollar versus what we would have spent building a second datacenter.
“Bottom line,” Lerner concludes, “as the company continues to grow and IT continues to get more complex requests, I’m able to scale and deliver whatever the business needs without additional capital and operating costs. That makes management very happy.”
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
For more information on Windows Azure, go to:
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