Thor Motor Coach

On July 19, 2024, American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its security software that crippled organizations around the world. Airlines grounded flights, hospitals canceled surgeries and retailers closed. But not Thor Motor Coach.

Fortunately, Thor Motor Coach had worked with NetApp to build a bulletproof intelligent data infrastructure that prevented any damage. The NetApp system was extremely redundant and resilient, with high uptime and availability. Business continuity meant all systems were restored before employees arrived to work in the morning.

Thor Motor Coach is the number one motorhome brand in North America, producing one out of every four motorhomes sold each year. Formed in 2010 as a strategic merger of Damon Motor Coach and Four Winds International, the company is an industry leader in introducing cutting-edge innovations. Thor Motor Coach is a subsidiary of Thor Industries, whose brands include Airstream, Jayco and several others.

Thor Motor Coach’s strategic imperative is to keep things simple – yet intentional – and develop a consolidated server management approach, making sure its data centers and workloads are fully optimized for their knowledge workers. Its ERP system cannot falter. SQL must be available for reporting. Other manufacturing and data services are vital for real-time operations and analysis.

To maintain data integrity and availability, the company created a hybrid approach that uses several NetApp technologies and storage devices, including all-flash systems along with VMware. This infrastructure is future-proofed for data analytics and an AI project that will require an on-premises data lake with cloud capabilities. By allowing access to its file shares, Thor Motor Coach will be able to use Gen AI tools on their data without having to move the sources.

Before Thor Motor Coach’s digital transformation, downtime was exceedingly high, burdened with a Windows scale-out and poor workload performance. The company replaced that with NetApp’s all-flash storage, consolidated servers on Cisco and virtualized everything with VMware except for their backup servers. Now, even their phone servers are virtualized. And all of it runs on unified data storage from NetApp: A-Series, C-Series and E-Series, depending on workloads.

Thor Motor Coach’s infrastructure costs have reduced by 30% per year, but and with increased performance.

Before the conversion, it took the company 76 hours to back up 15TB. Now, with much more data, it takes less than an hour.

Their ERP was down 32% of the time, or about 90 minutes a day. Now, they have fives nines, or about 5 minutes per year.

Zero network issues have meant vastly improved staff productivity. Interconnectivity between corporate locations is seamless, allowing instantaneous access to master data using 40GB bandwidth instead of 1GB. Old, expensive E circuits were replaced with a dark fiber provider, reducing costs by 45% a month.

“We're a vastly different looking organization than we were before the transformation – faster, more nimble, and cost-effective,” said Scott Sibert, Director of Information Technology, Thor Motor Coach.

Sibert believes the best advice when approaching this type of digital transformation project is to be very focused on the intention of what you're trying to do with your infrastructure. In other words, if you’re the only one who understands your infrastructure, you’re in trouble.

For example, if another person walks into your IT environment and asks, “What are you guys doing?” You should be able to explain it in less than 15 minutes.

Keep the network simple: hierarchical and intentional, which keeps costs down.

Thor Motor Coach has plans for a Gen AI project to take all of their data and make it ready for analysis. The data is still distributed – from Access databases to spreadsheets to cloud – so they will consolidate all that data into a data lake. The initial goal is to improve reporting and make data access easier across the company. They want to empower their end users to create reports themselves instead of relying on IT. As a global brand, it needs that kind of accurate, user-friendly data capabilities with a resilient, powerful digital infrastructure to back it up.

Digital transformation reaches different industries at different times. For this market and this leading manufacturing company, the transformation has been substantial. Thor Motor Coach now has the intelligent data infrastructure in place to not only improve existing operations but to propel itself into the future of AI.