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

HOPKINTON, Mass., Aug. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Safe Systems, Inc., a managed service provider for community financial institutions, selected EMC® VNX® unified storage over NetApp and HP. Safe Systems is using EMC VNX and EMC VNXe unified storage and VMware vSphere® virtualization solutions to meet fast-growing demand for its managed and network-based services through a 100% virtualized private cloud infrastructure.

Customer Benefits:

• Better efficiency and simplicity—Storage management time was reduced by 90%. 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 center footprint was reduced by 40% with the FAST Suite, Flash drives and high capacity NL-SAS drives in a 100% 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 manage 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 center. 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 scalability.  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 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
• Learn more about EMC VNXe

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, VMware, vSphere and Unisphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation. VMware and VMware vSphere are registered 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 between VMware and any other company. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation