Financial Services Provider Calls on EMC VNX and VNXe for 100 Per cent Virtualized Environment


Financial Services Provider Calls on EMC VNX and VNXe for 100 Per cent
Virtualized Environment

Chooses EMC VNX over NetApp and HP in 100 Per cent Virtualized
Environment; Achieves 40-Per cent Smaller Footprint Adopting a ‘FLASH
1st’ Strategy

HOPKINTON, Mass. – August 24, 2011 – EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC)
today announced that Safe Systems, Inc., a managed service provider for
community financial institutions, selected EMC® VNX®
(http://canada.emc.com/products/family/vnx-family.htm) unified
storage over NetApp and HP. Safe Systems is using EMC VNX and EMC VNXe
(http://canada.emc.com/products/series/vnxe-series.htm) unified
storage and VMware vSphere® virtualization solutions to meet
fast-growing demand for its managed and network-based services through a
100 per cent virtualized private cloud
(http://canada.emc.com/microsites/cloud/cloud.htm) infrastructure.

Customer Benefits:

* Better efficiency and simplicity – storage management time was
reduced by 90 per cent. Storage administration, which once required 10
hours per week, now only requires an hour per week – freeing more
resources for development of client services.

* Increased agility – storage can now be scaled out to support
fast-growing databases in just 10 minutes.

* Consolidated infrastructure – data centre footprint was reduced by
40 per cent with the FAST Suite, Flash drives and high capacity NL-SAS
drives in a 100 per cent virtualized infrastructure.

Safe Systems was looking to help its clients operate more efficiently
when using their services. To enable their clients to optimize the
desired efficiency, Safe Systems decided to deploy a private cloud
computing model by virtualizing its IT environment.

Brendan McGowan, Vice President of Technical Services, Safe Systems,
said, “We began our private cloud journey with virtualization but
found that our old storage infrastructure was holding us back because it
wasn’t scaling cost-effectively. We evaluated EMC, NetApp, HP and
other vendors and concluded that EMC VNX unified storage offered the
richest feature set at a very competitive price – with the best
integration with VMware software.”

“Since moving to EMC VNX, we’re able to deliver our very
predictable service levels and response times even though our workloads
are constantly fluctuating. We manage everything from network monitoring
systems that shoot out anti-virus updates to 20,000 endpoints as well as
spikes in our SQL Server and Exchange environments. EMC VNX is able to
support our unpredictable IT infrastructure with ease. Additionally,
we’ve deployed a ‘FLASH 1st’ strategy where, with just a few
Flash drives and the FAST Suite, we’re able to automatically ensure
that the most highly active data is served from Flash drives using FAST
Cache or FAST VP. Lastly, we save on ‘physical’ space in our data
centre. Without ‘FLASH 1st’ and virtualization, we’d require about
40-times more real estate to deliver our current level of services,”
said McGowan. “For example, seven Flash drives replaced 100 x 15k
spindles – that’s a dramatic savings!”

Safe Systems decided to use VNX for its enterprise infrastructure to
deliver hosted services to customers and its internal operations, while
using VNXe for its on-premise solution for customers.

“The shared storage options that were available to us before VNXe
made it difficult for our customers to afford an entire solution,”
said McGowan. “With VNXe, we can now offer services with the features
and scalability that our customers demand.”

Safe Systems also implemented EMC Unisphere across its complete VNXe
and VNX infrastructure to help focus developing new services for its
customers while decreasing the time spent on storage administrative
tasks.

McGowan stated, “Simplicity was a key benefit that we saw from
implementing our VNX, from basic storage administration to s
calability.
We spend about an hour a week on basic storage admin now – compared
with at least 10 hours before we moved to the VNX family. It’s just a
whole lot simpler to manage with Unisphere. We’ve had certain
databases that overwhelmed our old infrastructure. The ability to scale
out the storage behind them quickly was a requirement for us. With VNX
and VMware software, it’s simple to add more disks or create a new
storage location, and then move that workload to the new location – in
just a few clicks,” said McGowan.

McGowan added, “Safe Systems is a small company. We don’t have the
resources to be experts on every technology. EMC has helped us to
develop our business and accelerate our adoption of cloud. And as EMC
and VMware develop new features and technologies, we know they’ll be
integrated before any other vendor.”

Safe Systems relies on EMC VNX and VMware
(http://canada.emc.com/products/family/vmware-family.htm) vSphere to
deliver services to clients and support its own operations. Safe
Systems’ most demanding applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server
databases, run on EMC VNX unified storage, and leverage the benefits of
Flash drive and EMC FAST Cache for performance optimization. Safe
Systems provides clients on-premise solutions based on EMC VNXe unified
storage and VMware. EMC Unisphere®software provides a simple and
intuitive interface for provisioning, monitoring and managing storage.

Additional Resources

* View the customer video ()
* Learn more about EMC VNX
(http://www.emc.com/products/family/vnx-family.htm)
* Learn more about EMC VNXe
(http://www.emc.com/products/series/vnxe-series.htm)

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service
providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service.
Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through
innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud
computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze
their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted
and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at
www.EMC.com.

EMC Canada (www.EMC2.ca), headquartered in Toronto with nine offices
from coast to coast, is a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC Corporation.

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For more information contact:
Mike Martin/Michelle Chang
StrategicAmpersand
416-961-5595
mike@stratamp.com
michelle@stratamp.com


EMC, VNX, VMware, vSphere and Unisphere are registered trademarks or
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trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or
other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or
“partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship
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