United Technologies in $4.5B IT overhaul

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June 10, 2002 (Computerworld) -- United Technologies Corp. (UTC) announced last week that it is undergoing a complete IT infrastructure overhaul and consolidation that will cost $4.5 billion but will save the company $1 billion through efficiencies over the next 15 years.

The project, which UTC has outsourced to Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) in El Segundo, Calif., includes changing out 45,000 PCs, standardizing on a single backup-and-recovery platform and consolidating the business-critical workloads in 20 major data centers into three. The majority of the work is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Most recently, CSC helped the Hartford, Conn.-based conglomerate standardized its North American data centers on Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas Software Corp.'s NetBackup storage software utility. The suite gives UTC autodiscovery features and centralized and remote management capabilities. The company had been using a variety of point products for backup and management services that occasionally lost mission-critical data.

"Before, we were dealing with backups occurring haphazardly, depending upon where a device was. Now every critical system will have a disaster recovery plan," said UTC CIO John Doucette.

Bob Zimmerman, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., said that many companies that are consolidating IT systems are discovering that their old backup systems don't work.

Zimmerman noted that Veritas' NetBackup product tends to be the priciest among those in its class, but it's also the easiest to configure.

UTC's companies, which include Pratt & Whitney, Hamilton Sundstrand Corp., Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., Carrier Corp., Otis Elevator Co. and UTC Fuel Cells, had been operating out of data centers running on proprietary platforms.

After decades of growth, the $28 billion company's data centers and server farms were dispersed throughout the U.S. Its eight mainframes, 11 IBM AS/400 servers and 2,950 other servers were also dispersed among those data centers. Since having consolidated them into a mirrored data center on its Pratt & Whitney campus in East Hartford and two other data centers owned by CSC in Meriden, Conn., and Norwich, Conn., the company needs only two mainframes and two AS/400 systems. It expects to drop about 350 servers by the end of the year.

"We identified 160,000 pieces of software and probably ended up putting 5,000 pieces of software back," Doucette said. "The other thing we did with our PCs was to lock them down. People can't go out on the Internet and download software onto them. There's just tons of inefficiencies with that."

UTC is creating two storage-area networks, also to be located on the East Hartford campus, that will run off of Hitachi Data Systems Corp. Freedom Storage 9900 and EMC Corp. Symmetrix RAID boxes.

The company is also standardizing its network on Computer Associates International Inc.'s Unicenter TNG management tool. In another move, UTC consolidated 15 help desks running nine applications into one center running one system.

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