Francis Drilling Fluids, Ltd. Deploys SimpliVity’s OmniStack™ Hyperconverged Infrastructure Platform
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Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- SimpliVity’s OmniStack™
- Cisco UCS C240 C-Series systems
Tech Stack
- Microsoft Dynamics NAV
- Microsoft Exchange
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Cisco Unified Communications Manager
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Oil & Gas
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Fleet Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Francis Drilling Fluids, Ltd. (FDF) is one of the oldest drilling fluids companies on the Gulf Coast and is a true American success story. The company started with one truck in 1977 and has grown into the largest drilling fluids supplier on the Gulf Coast and a leader in logistics operations for the fracking industry. Now 23 plants strong, FDF offers a full range of high quality fluid products and services, including liquid mud storage, specialized mixing, water-based chemicals, completion fluids, completion fluids chemicals, casing scrubs, and corrosion inhibitors. The company is based in Lafayette, Louisiana. FDF also runs a variety of different mission critical applications including Microsoft Exchange, Kronos time and attendance, Kofax/Axacore for document imaging, and NetTraQ for GPS fleet tracking, along with custom inventory tracking and logistics software.
The Challenge
Francis Drilling Fluids, Ltd. (FDF) had been using an IBM BladeCenter infrastructure, IBM SAN storage, DLT tape solutions, and Veeam for VM backup protection. Over time, the company saw more demand for new applications and experienced significant growth in VM servers, which put significant strain on the existing legacy infrastructure and the small IT team. The added complexity from the VM server 'sprawl' coupled with initiatives to improve data protection, DR, and co-location hosting, the company's IT department decided to take a closer look at converged infrastructure. The company works hard to ensure alignment between business strategy and IT strategy, according to Steve Schaaf, Chief Information Officer for FDF. However, with a small IT shop, executing on that vision can be challenging.
The Solution
FDF decided to deploy two Cisco C240 M3 systems in its Lafayette, Louisiana data center and another pair of Cisco C240 M3 systems, consisting of a space efficient, 2U x86 platform, in a co-location facility in Dallas for disaster recovery. FDF required a full set of functionality, including flexible Cisco UCS C-series 2U x86 platforms with pooling and sharing of all resources, simple, cost-effective, incremental scale-out in the future, ease of use and unified global management from one interface with a VM/application-centric approach, fully-integrated data efficiency with inline deduplication and policy-based data protection for improved business continuity, management and visibility that is VM-application-centric Support quick and simple deployment. Since installing SimpliVity, FDF has been able to reduce its data center footprint from 200 to 4U by eliminating its BladeCenter unit, tape backup solution, SAN and expansion cabinets.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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