Manufacturer Uses Hybrid Cloud Model to Gain
Increased Storage, Unprecedented Agility
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.
“It didn’t make sense to
buy more servers every
time we needed more
storage. We were also
reluctant to expand our
expensive SAN.”
Scott Lerner, Director of Information
Technology, GF Health Products
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
“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.”
Scott Lerner, Director of Information
Technology, GF Health Products
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.
StorSimple employs a three-tiered
architecture, placing frequently used data
on high-speed solid-state drives, lessfrequently 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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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 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.
“We have a very small IT
staff, and System Center
2012 R2 will let us
extend our staff’s
capabilities.”
Scott Lerner, Director of Information
Technology, GF Health Products
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 onpremises 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 documentsharing and collaboration platform and
“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.”
Scott Lerner, Director of Information
Technology, GF Health Products
possibly augmenting it with Microsoft
SharePoint Online.
versus what we would have spent building
a second datacenter.
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.”
“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.”
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
For More Information
Windows Azure
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United States and
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
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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
Windows Azure is an open and flexible
cloud platform that enables you to quickly
build, deploy and manage applications
across a global network of Microsoftmanaged 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:
www.windowsazure.com
For more information about Intellinet
products and services, visit the website
at:
www.intellinet.com
For more information about GF Health
Products products and services, visit the
website at:
www.grahamfield.com
Software and Services
Windows Azure
− Windows Azure Storage
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter
− Microsoft System Center 2012 R2
 Technologies
− Hyper-V


Solutions
− StorSimple
Partners

Intellinet
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2014
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