This week’s EMC World 2014 Event, held at The Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, was the site of one of the two live broadcasts brought to you by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE. Joining co-hosts Jeff Frick and Steve Kenniston was the Technical Services Manager for Greenheck Fan, Eric Pond. Setting the stage for the interview, Kenniston began by asking Eric to describe Greenheck and its technology.

“We’re a private manufacturing company located in the Midwest right in the central Wisconsin area. That’s where our corporate headquarters are. We are the premier manufacturer of large air movement equipment, so, fans, ventilators, different dampers and louvers that you find in non-residential constructed buildings,” Pond explained.

Greenheck claims to be number one or number two within each market segment for which they manufacture. In addition to its manufacturing facilities in the US, the company has international facilities in Saltillo, Mexico, in China right outside of Shanghai and in India outside Delhi. The interesting thing about Greenheck’s international facilities is that the products manufactured there are not shipped back to the US. They are actually meant for that specific international market.

The story of Greenheck IT

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Kenniston went on to ask Pond to share a sense of how big Greenheck’s IT shop is, and some of the challenges they’re facing. He responded saying that there are three main divisions underneath the same Greenheck Group umbrella. Their IT department totals around 75 employees. Pond has a team of 13 dedicated to the infrastructure, and this includes the operation area that consists of the help desk and desktop group.

• Going from physical to virtual servers

In terms of capacity, Greenheck’s production SAP environment is about 1.5 TB in the database itself. The total online storage is around 16 TB that the company provides through file shares for other Oracle environments. Greenheck also has about 200 physical servers and 300 virtual servers.

“Our physical numbers of servers are going down quite dramatically,” Pond noted. “This was actually the second year in a row that our power and cooling usage in our main data center actually went down. We’re actually pulling out racks that we had in the data center that were full at one time.”

This is mostly due to virtualization and the ability with some of the new storage devices that Greenheck has, such as the VNX platform and tiered storage, which allows them to do more with less.

• Implementing VDI

Pond also touched on Greenheck’s VDI implementation. Kenniston asked how far the company has gone with it and what their next steps are.

“Because we’re running SAP and we have a very sophisticated manufacturing floor environment, we’re a very lean organization so it’s one piece flow,” said Pond. “We don’t have a lot of inventory. What that means in SAP land is we have lots of terminals on the shop floor running our SAP system so our manufacturing employees can go in and key in what they need. They know exactly what’s going on. They scan barcodes, do confirmations, look at work orders, look at what’s coming down the road, down the pipe that they can prepare for. That said, we have about 500 shop floor terminals on our manufacturing.”

Pond detailed that Greenheck spent the last eight to nine months testing out VDI to see if it was worth it. He also went on to say that they are waiting for the bleeding edge people to take over to look at the VDI environment as a whole, letting someone else worry about the bugs.

This strategy has worked out better than expected, and performance has been very good, Pond explained. The company is buying thin client devices that are ruggedized. They will now be able to roll out VDI with boxes that can just be plugged in without the need for a high-end desktop person.

Other benefits that Greenheck have found with VDI is keeping all their data in their data center and having a single VDI session that clients can access through their mobile devices.