Global Law Firm Saves Millions of Dollars After Transforming with EMC

Blank Rome Transforms to Create a Private Cloud; Reduces Storage Footprint by 60% and Increases Storage Capacity by 40% While Continuing to Innovate

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EMC Corporation

Aug 27, 2012, 09:00 ET

HOPKINTON, Mass., Aug. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Blank Rome LLP, one of America's largest law firms, has implemented EMC® VNX® unified storage, EMC Avamar, EMC RecoverPoint and VMware® virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies to transform its global IT infrastructure to enable more efficient growth, improved agility and increased performance. Blank Rome transformed its IT infrastructure, moving to a virtual environment to create a private cloud. 

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As part of its transformation, Blank Rome has increased the performance and availability of its mission-critical applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. According to an annual global end user survey by IDC1, more customers choose EMC storage than any other vendor's for their Microsoft environments and other mission-critical applications.

Customer Benefits:

  • Cost Savings – Blank Rome has saved millions of dollars in hardware and maintenance expenditures and reduced energy costs 30% as a result of massive storage consolidation and server virtualization. 
  • Better Business Agility – With EMC VNX unified storage, Blank Rome has reduced its storage footprint by 60% and increased storage capacity by 40%, supporting the firm's ongoing business expansion.
  • Increased Performance –Blank Rome has increased the performance of the firm's business-critical Microsoft SQL Server applications while managing an exponential increase in transactions.
  • Streamlined Administration – Blank Rome is able to develop business-critical applications and react quickly to demands from the business, provisioning new systems faster to accommodate growth, rather than manage equipment. 
  • Enhanced Disaster Recovery – With EMC Avamar and EMC RecoverPoint, Blank Rome has achieved a 99% deduplication rate and 85% reduction in application recovery time, allowing it to focus on further IT transformation.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

For the past 5+ years, Blank Rome  has been expanding its operations, which led to significantly increased storage, server and protection requirements for its mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, email archiving and litigation support. In addition, the firm's main data center was running out of floor space and data backup windows were overlapping with production hours.

To transform its infrastructure for increased efficiency, performance and agility, Blank Rome standardized on EMC SANs, and most recently, VNX unified storage as the foundation of its powerful and flexible private cloud. In addition, the firm has virtualized nearly 100% of its IT infrastructure with VMware vSphere™ and supports nearly 400 virtual machines across the globe. Blank Rome's mission-critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange 2010, SQL Server and SharePoint, spans the firm's primary data center in Philadelphia, and remote office or disaster recovery sites in Pittsburgh, New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Blank Rome depends on EMC RecoverPoint™ for continuous replication and point in time recovery of its VNX environment to its disaster recovery site 300 miles away in Pittsburgh. Blank Rome uses EMC Avamar® deduplication backup software and system to protect its virtualized infrastructure across the US and Asia with replication of Avamar backups to grids located in LA and off site at a SunGard facility in Philadelphia.

Customer Quotes:

Larry Liss, Chief Technology Officer, Blank Rome

"The streamlined provisioning, enabled by VNX and VMware, is a real game changer because we can grow quickly and efficiently, without disruption. It's also critical to delivering the high value and quality service that are hallmarks of our firm."

"By transforming our infrastructure with VNX, VMware, Avamar and RecoverPoint, we've reduced our administrative costs and our engineers have shifted to developing more mission-critical business applications rather than managing equipment. In fact, even with the firm's growth, our entire virtualized, storage and disaster recovery environments have been implemented and maintained in-house by a single staff member."

Frank Gurfolino, Chief Network Architect, Blank Rome

"EMC makes it easy and affordable for just one person to manage a state-of-the-art data center.  EMC VNX is so simple to use that even with just one person managing the firm's virtual infrastructure, we can provide our clients with the best possible service while continuing to innovate. Without EMC's affordability and simplicity, we wouldn't have been able to transform and create a powerful and flexible private cloud that enables us to react quickly to the demands of the business."

"With virtualization and consolidation, we've avoided the need to buy hundreds of servers. The VNX reduced our storage footprint by about 60%, while providing 40% more capacity. By reducing our hardware, we've lowered our power and cooling consumption significantly. It adds up to millions of dollars in savings, enabling us to increase the value of our technology investments."

"With everything we've put on Avamar, we have a deduplication rate of over 99%, so our backups take so much less time than before. We used to start backing up to tape in the evening and run into the next day with daily backups. Our month-end runs would take days. They now complete in a matter of hours, well within our backup window. It's been truly amazing."

"EMC's umbrella of technologies work really well together and set the foundation for building our private cloud. There's real peace of mind knowing that the engineers developing our storage, backup, and virtualization solutions all collaborate. The products are rock-solid, and we see no reason to look elsewhere as we continue to evolve our cloud strategy."

Additional Resources:

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, EMC RecoverPoint and Avamar are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

1 IDC, "IDC's Storage Users Demand Survey 2012 - Fall Edition: Customers Still Want Choice, #234651"

SOURCE EMC Corporation