Case Study: Francis Drilling achieves reduced data center footprint, improved disaster recovery, and lower costs with HPE Simplivity

Francis Drilling - Customer Case Study

Francis Drilling Fluids (FDF), a Gulf Coast drilling fluids and logistics provider with 23 plants, faced an aging IT stack—IBM BladeCenter, SAN, tape backups and Veeam—that was strained by VM sprawl, rapid data growth (≈30%/year) and the need for stronger backup, disaster recovery and high‑performance database support for customer portals and mission‑critical apps. With a small IT team, FDF needed a simpler, scalable infrastructure that reduced management overhead, improved recovery capabilities and lowered costs.

FDF deployed SimpliVity’s OmniStack hyperconverged solution on four Cisco UCS C240 servers across its Lafayette site and a Dallas colo, gaining inline deduplication/compression, VM‑centric policy-based protection and unified vCenter management. The move cut the data center footprint from 20U to 4U, eliminated tape/SAN and reduced licensing and maintenance costs, delivered effective capacity savings (a 30TB unit now uses a fraction of its capacity), sped deployments from days to hours, and provided easier, scalable DR and operations managed by a single administrator.

Francis Drilling

Steve Schaaf

Chief Information Officer