EMC Gives Texas City a 230% Storage Performance Boost

HOPKINTON, Mass., May 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that the City of Denton, Texas has standardized on EMC technologies including EMC® VNX® unified storage and EMC VPLEX™ Metro virtual storage technology, as well as Vblock® Infrastructure Platforms from VCE, replacing its underperforming NetApp, IBM and Dell Compellent storage environment.  At 90% virtualized, the City of Denton is leveraging VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies including VMware vSphere and vCenter Operations Management Suite to optimize efficiency, streamline management and transform  its IT infrastructure.   Since implementing its EMC-based infrastructure, the City of Denton has dramatically increased performance, streamlined administration, and developed a solid business continuity strategy. 

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Performance—Since moving to a "FLASH 1st" strategy with VNX, Denton's storage performance has increased by more than 230%.
• Streamlined Administration—Tight integration between VNX and VMware reduced administration time, freeing Denton's IT staff to focus on more critical projects.
• Improved Reliability – The City of Denton has increased the reliability of its Tier 1 applications since implementing a test and development environment with VNX.
• Seamless Business Continuity—VPLEX data mobility allows Denton to utilize all the resources in both its data centers for production applications, high availability and disaster recovery, while avoiding $180,000 in missed revenue per day if an outage of its billing system for city-owned utilities occurred.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

The City of Denton's NetApp storage environment was no longer providing adequate capacity and system performance.  Operating under constant threat of tornados and flooding, the City of Denton also lacked a viable disaster recovery solution. With potential outages costing $180,000 per day in lost revenue from city-owned utilities, it needed a better high availability plan to avoid costly disasters. 

The City of Denton replaced its underperforming NetApp, IBM and Dell Compellent storage solution with VNX running EMC's FAST™ Suite, including FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) and FAST Cache, to manage its Microsoft SQL, Exchange, JD Edwards ERP and Harris Northstar billing environment.  To help increase reliability of its Tier 1 applications, the City of Denton created a test and development environment using VNX.  Embracing a FLASH 1st strategy, the City of Denton leverages the EMC FAST Suite to ensure that active data is stored on Flash drives for maximum performance, while cold data is stored on inexpensive, high-capacity drives for optimal efficiency.

To reduce complexity and operation costs while improving system performance and availability, the City of Denton built a disaster recovery site. The VPLEX Metro, with its "Federated AccessAnywhere" technology, was installed at a remote data center site, enabling the City of Denton to actively share resources across both data centers and achieve complete mission critical business continuity.  In addition, the City of Denton implemented a Vblock Infrastructure Platform that integrates Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) technologies, Cisco networking, EMC VNX storage and VMware vSphere virtualization in its disaster recovery facility for replication of VNX storage. Denton has also optimized efficiency by virtualizing 90% of its server infrastructure with VMware® vSphere™ and streamlined management with VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM).

Customer Quotes:

Kevin Gunn, Director of Technology Services, City of Denton, Texas

"Because we rely on taxpayer dollars, it's very important we use technology efficiently while also delivering high-quality services to city employees and the public. VNX and the FAST Suite optimize our use of tiered disk drives and cache memory, helping boost performance without requiring us to make a huge investment in expensive disk drives.  Our staff has increased their efficiency by reducing the time they spend on tedious administration tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical IT projects."

"Our previous NetApp storage array was maxed out, which resulted in our virtual servers performing poorly. Since deploying VNX with the FAST Suite, we've now seen an amazing performance increase of over 230%."

"We really like the flexibility of having iSCSI, fibre channel and NAS all in VNX's unified storage over NetApp.  For example, we would need to buy additional hardware, licensing and maintenance when we wanted to add fibre channel as a backup target for our video surveillance data with NetApp.  With VNX, we can easily scale to meet our IT needs without impacting performance."

"If the billing system for our city-owned utilities suffers an outage, we'd lose about $180,000 per day in missed revenue. It was clear to our elected officials that preventing a financial loss of such magnitude made EMC's VPLEX solution well worth the investment."

"Because we can freely move virtual machines and data across inter-site distances with VPLEX, we're able to fully leverage resources in both our data centers without expensive equipment sitting idle in a dark disaster recovery facility. We've achieved seamless and efficient business continuity that protects our city government from downtime around the clock."

Additional Resources:

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

About VNX

The award-winning VNX Family offers customers simple, efficient, affordable and powerful unified storage optimized for virtualized application environments. With the EMC FAST Suite, VNX customers can cost-effectively leverage the benefits of Flash performance --with "no compromise". VNXe® offers an affordable unified storage platform for smaller businesses with solution-focused software that's easy to manage, provision, and protect. The Family dramatically simplifies the deployment and management of virtualized applications, including those from Microsoft, Oracle, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions from VMware and Citrix.

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, VNXe, and VPLEX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VCE and Vblock are registered trademarks or trademarks of VCE Company LLC or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation