Mediaprint Transforms IT and Streamlines Editorial Operations with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Mediaprint, the largest newspaper and magazine publisher in Austria, has transformed its IT infrastructure with EMC^® VNX^® unified storage, EMC VPLEX^® Metro virtual storage and VMware virtualization solutions. The EMC and VMware solutions have enabled Mediaprint to increase application performance by 300%, achieve five-nines availability for critical publishing, editorial and production systems, as well as accelerate virtualization of its IT infrastructure.

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Customer Benefits:

• Accelerated Virtualization — Tight integration between VNX and VMware provided Mediaprint with the performance and availability to quickly advance its virtualization strategy and increase the number of virtual machines by 8X in only 18 months.
• Improved Application Availability — By running applications simultaneously across two data centers with VPLEX, Mediaprint achieved five-nines availability for its critical SAP and Oracle applications.
• Increased Performance — Leveraging a FLASH 1^st strategy, Mediaprint improved response times for SAP by 300% and increased performance of its Oracle data warehouse by 500%, ensuring timely delivery of news stories.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Following years of business growth, Mediaprint had expanded its infrastructure to the point where its servers and storage environment reached capacity limits. The productivity of editorial, advertising and business users was being affected by slower application performance. In addition, the sprawling infrastructure was difficult to manage and exposed Mediaprint to the risk of losing editorial content should a data center outage occur.

To address these challenges, Mediaprint selected EMC VNX and VPLEX Metro solutions to consolidate three data centers down to two. VNX provides Mediaprint with a FLASH 1^st automated storage tiering strategy that leverages the EMC FAST™ Suite to substantially improve performance and lower TCO, while VPLEX Metro allows resources to be used simultaneously in an active-active mode across both data centers that are 26 kilometers (16.16 miles) apart. The EMC solution supports all of Mediaprint's critical SAP advertising management applications, as well as Oracle databases running its editorial and logistics systems.

Leveraging EMC storage and VMware vSphere solutions, Mediaprint has fully virtualized its critical SAP applications and is rapidly virtualizing the rest of its infrastructure, including Oracle databases. The company also relies on VMware vMotion for migration of virtual machines (VMs) between its two data centers. Since implementing VNX, VPLEX and VMware, Mediaprint has achieved much faster application response times for its users, simplified IT administration and increased application availability.

Customer Quotes:

Ferdinand Karner, Head of Department, Systems and Database Services, Mediaprint

"SAP and Oracle are our most important business systems. Some companies fear virtualizing such critical applications, but the integration across our EMC and VMware environments gave us the confidence to virtualize SAP and Oracle and ultimately all of our enterprise applications."

"We looked at several options, but only EMC had the right combination of performance, availability and ease of management that enabled us to rapidly virtualize our infrastructure. In just 18 months, we have increased the number of virtual machines by 8X."

"With EMC and VMware, we've seen a 300% improvement in response times for some SAP applications and performance of our Oracle data warehouses have increased by 500%. Editorial and business staff can work faster so that important news stories and advertising copy are delivered quickly and efficiently."

"VPLEX Metro allows us to run applications at full tilt from either of our two data centers simultaneously even though they're 26 kilometers apart. Every part of our editorial system is time-critical. And without our logistics system we can't print newspapers. Any downtime or delay can mean loss of revenue. VPLEX Metro was the only solution that fit our needs because it provides full redundancy across both data center without a single point of failure. We now have five-nines availability and our latency is just one millisecond, which is excellent."

"We have a small IT department and can't spend all day administering storage. Using the FAST Suite, we don't have to worry about prioritizing our Flash drives for our most demanding applications — it's all done automatically, and the administrative interface with VNX is simple to use. So we get a performance boost and more time for IT projects that help streamline and accelerate our publishing operations."

"EMC helped us to achieve our IT transformation over the last 18 months by offering the right products for virtualization of both our storage and server layers. EMC's excellent technical support and commitment to our business also have contributed to making this project so successful."

Additional Resources:

• View the Mediaprint video
• Read the customer profile
• 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 computingcloud 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, FAST, 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