Earlier this month, theCUBE was at EMC World 2014, held at The Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, hosting two live broadcasts brought to you by SiliconANGLE. In this interview, Jeremy Lawrence, Director of IT for Eclipse Aerospace, sat down with Jeff Frick and Steve Kenniston to talk about the Eclipse 550 jet and virtualizing the assets of its former company.

Lawrence described Eclipse as the manufacturer of the world’s first very light jet – the Eclipse 550. He also explained that the company bought the assets of Eclipse Aviation, then bankrupt. They inherited that design and all of their work. A lot of the IT transformation that they went through with EMC’s products came out of that bankruptcy.

Digging more into the Eclipse 550, it’s a twin engine jet, flies at 41,000 feet, sips fuel at about 59 gallons an hour making it the world’s most fuel efficient jet, travels at 430 mph and seats five plus the pilot. He added that the features inside the aircraft are things you won’t see anywhere else, except for maybe commercial jets or fighter aircrafts. Eclipse just recently sold their first 550 jets and also moved several out of production in the last quarter.

In terms of competition in the very light aircraft space, Lawrence said that they do have competitors – one being the Embraer Phenom. However, Eclipse has a really narrow window for their price point, which Lawrence believes will allow them to do very well.

Managing a manufacturing firm with a small staff

 .

Lawrence said that Eclipse runs on a small team of 12 doing the work that a team of 60 used to do. He explained that it really comes down to applications specialists for product lifecycle management and expertise in SAP, each worker having their own specialty. Additionally, they have two system administrators who run the IT infrastructure, a help desk triage and security.

Their small staff supports a large manufacturing operation. “We don’t really manufacture so much as we source a large supply chain all over the world,” said Lawrence. The company gets all of their supply and SAP manufacturing operations pulled into one location for final assembly in Albuquerque.

• Virtualizing Eclipse Aviation’s Assets

From an IT perspective, Eclipse Aerospace virtualized everything inherited from Eclipse Aviation. Lawrence explained that, when they bought the assets, everything was “as is, where is.” There was no instruction manual, and Lawrence’s team was left to figure it out.

Lawrence said that they had no choice but to fully virtualize the entire company. They started with three computer rooms, 28 rack positions, AC in various stages of functionality and 200+ servers. Additionally, they had all of Eclipse Aviation’s intellectual property for the entire company hanging by a thread. Things were end of life, end of service and no one wanted to talk to them because they equated them with the former company. They ended up virtualizing all of it, put it into one Vblock and then started backing it up with Avamar disc backup systems.

The full integration was completed about three years ago. Lawrence mentioned that he started at the company in 2010 after they acquired the assets, and that 95 percent of servers migrated within a month with the remaining 5 percent migrated over the next three months. They are now working on untangling the application infrastructure, which, for them, is a process by which you manufacture and restart an airplane factoring.

Refusing to be the ‘speed bump’

 .

Frick asked Lawrence how the necessity to virtualize has enabled business growth. Starting off his response, Lawrence said that he didn’t want IT to eclipse aerospace and be the rate-limiting step. He didn’t want people to consider them the speed bump when something happens, and they really need to take off and get going. Stabilizing the infrastructure so that they weren’t fighting their own tools, and getting the engineers working on a reliable platform was his main goal.

New Initiative

Concluding the interview, Frick asked Lawrence about what new initiatives Eclipse has on the horizon. Lawrence said that, when sales begin to move out internationally, service centers are going to be a part of the Eclipse landscape. These centers will become hubs for the company to disseminate timely information out to owners and pilots, and service their aircraft.

Lawrence added that they develop their own software, their test pilots fly it and their engineers then go do the whole cycle again. They have one of the best safety records in the market with 200,000 flight hours without incidence, making it both a safe and very fast aircraft.

“At 41,000 feet, at 500 miles an hour, you don’t want to see the blue screen of death popping up…,” Frick added.