Case Study: Safran Power UK achieves scalable, highly available virtualization and simplified storage with Scale Computing HC3

Safran - Customer Case Study

Safran Power UK (formerly Goodrich Electrical Power Systems), a UK subsidiary of Safran, was rapidly expanding and facing explosive data growth that strained a small IT team. Their legacy environment—VMware vSphere 4.1 on leased hosts with Dell EqualLogic storage and tape backups—required frequent weekend maintenance, slow restores, and costly licensing, so they needed a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure that avoided overprovisioning and downtime.

Safran deployed Scale Computing HC3 (two 8‑node systems) to combine storage and virtualization in a single, easy-to-manage platform with no separate hypervisor licenses. The solution simplified operations (no training required), enabled on-demand provisioning for engineers, eliminated weekend on-call outages, moved backups from tape to disk with deduplication (enabling nightly full backups and 4–6 weeks online retention and dramatic data reduction), and set the stage for broader rollout across the business.

Safran

Leonard Powers

IT Infrastructure and Engineering Mgr.