Belgian Benefits Firm Transforms IT Infrastructure with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Partena, a Brussels-based social services organization that provides 1.2 million individuals and 60,000 companies with payroll and human resource management, employment insurance, benefits management and other services, has transformed its IT infrastructure with EMC^® VNX^® unified storage and EMC VPLEX^® virtual storage to address exponential data growth. Partena credits EMC with significant cost savings and eliminating infrastructure downtime.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Application Availability — By running applications simultaneously across two active-active data centers with EMC VPLEX, Partena has eliminated downtime — a reduction of three hours per month to zero.
• Cost Savings — Partena has reduced its operational and capital expenditures by 60% through virtualization, providing more resources for projects that drive business growth and increase customer satisfaction.
• Faster Application Deployment — Partena is able to roll out new applications in only a few days versus the one month it typically took before — a 90% reduction in deployment time.
• Streamlined Administration — Tight integration between VNX and VMware has reduced administration time by 50%, freeing Partena's IT staff to focus on more critical projects.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Partena's storage infrastructure was expanding rapidly while government regulations and customer service-level agreements (SLAs) that specified lengthy data retention periods and high data availability requirements were putting added pressures on the infrastructure. To help improve availability, enable faster deployment and reduce expenses, Partena selected EMC VNX and EMC VPLEX.

Since implementing EMC technologies, Partena has achieved significant improvements in infrastructure scalability, efficiency and application availability. The company has also virtualized 90% of its server infrastructure using VMware vSphere. All of Partena's applications and databases, including Microsoft SQL Servers and Oracle databases, reside on EMC VNX unified storage. To enable disaster recovery, Partena uses EMC VPLEX virtual storage to run its critical applications simultaneously across two data centers several hundred meters apart.  Partena also leverages VMware View for desktop virtualization.

Customer Quotes:

Philippe Picalausa, IT Manager, Partena

"We operate under strict SLAs and government regulations that require us to generate payroll and other employee services within specified time periods. With EMC VPLEX, we're able to run all our applications in an active-active mode across two separate data centers. If a server fails, the application continues to run at the alternate site without any disruption to our users and customers."

"Our EMC infrastructure is absolutely critical to the smooth and reliable operation of our business. In fact, since we've been using EMC storage, we haven't had any storage-related downtime. Now we've added VPLEX, enabling us to increase security and protection by eliminating infrastructure downtime."

"The tight integration between our VMware and VNX environments has reduced administration time by 50%, which in turn has freed our IT staff to focus on more critical projects.  Rapid virtualization combined with VNX's excellent performance and simplified management has reduced our IT operational and capital expenditures by 60%."

"Our business is much more agile now that we've virtualized with VMware and EMC. We can deploy new applications in a few days versus the month it took us before. That's a 90% reduction in time. It's very easy to create proofs of concepts, test scenarios and other environments to develop new services and features that help expand the business and improve customer satisfaction."

"When we initially virtualized desktops at the branch level, we discovered how much easier it is to manage virtual desktops compared to physical PCs and laptops. For example, we can distribute upgrades faster with just a few clicks. And users can boot up their virtual desktops more quickly."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VNX and EMC VPLEX
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

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, VNX and VPLEX are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation