Crossflight Achieves Lift-off to the Cloud with EMC

LONDON, Oct. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Crossflight, a leading independent express courier, mail and logistics provider in the UK, has chosen EMC over Hitachi, IBM and HP to transform its IT infrastructure, drive its ongoing virtualization program and to better support customer service. With 90% of Crossflight's customer orders conducted online through its website, it selected EMC VNX^® unified storage to help effectively manage its mission-critical applications, such as Pervasive SQL; minimize costly downtime and boost its storage performance and availability. Crossflight is also using VMware vSphere for its 85% VMware virtualized infrastructure.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Performance – Crossflight has increased performance by 20% since implementing VNX.
• Improved Data Availability – With VNX and vSphere, Crossflight is able to efficiently manage its infrastructure and perform system maintenance without any service interruption to its vital online transaction services.
• Significant Cost Savings – Crossflight has reduced power and cooling demands by 50% with VNX and vSphere, while avoiding costly downtime for maintenance that can lead to £60,000 in missed revenue per day.
• Streamlined Administration –Tight integration between VNX and VMware has simplified system management, reducing administration time and cost and enabling Crossflight's IT staff to focus on more critical projects.

Customer Challenges and Solutions:

Crossflight's IT infrastructure is critical to its operations and ability to process customer orders, 90% of which are conducted online through its website. However, Crossflight's legacy storage infrastructure was no longer meeting its information storage demands and lacked the integration with VMware that it required. To better support its customer service and ongoing virtualization program, Crossflight needed a storage solution that could provide increased system performance, data availability and scalability.

After evaluating several solutions from EMC, Hitachi, IBM and HP, Crossflight selected EMC VNX with VMware vSphere for its performance, scalability and tight integration with VMware. With its EMC and VMware technologies, the company has improved performance by 20%, increased data availability and achieved significant cost savings. Crossflight is now able to efficiently and simply manage its infrastructure and perform system maintenance without any service interruption to its vital online transaction services or other mission-critical applications. By rapidly provisioning virtual machines, Crossflight can ensure that its customers and partners always have rapid and uninterrupted access to order details, transactions and shipment histories. Tight integration between VNX and VMware also helps Crossflight streamline administration and eliminate costly downtime for maintenance that can lead to £60,000 in missed revenue per day. Additionally, Crossflight has been able to reduce power and cooling demands by 50% with VNX, resulting in resulting in annual cost savings.

Customer Quote:

Guy Dawson, IT Manager, Crossflight

"Due to the nature of our business, data availability and performance is vital to our operation. If our systems go down, our operations can completely stop and we can lose up to £60,000 per day. Thanks to more powerful processors in the VNX, performance has increased by 20 per cent and the total cost of ownership is lower. With our IT infrastructure upgraded, we can ensure we provide the highest quality level of service to our customers."

"Because of integrated VMware tools and enhancements, the administration and management of the VNX requires little oversight. There's so little to it and it's so easy to use. We can create and provision new virtual machines in only minutes, and take snapshots of virtual machines for testing and backup."

"Customer support was another key reason we selected EMC. We find the EMC support staff is extremely knowledgeable and has the virtualization expertise we require."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VNX
• Read the customer profile
• 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 analyse their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. More information can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC is a registered trademark of EMC Corporation. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation