Online Superstore Standardizes on EMC To Drive Rapid Sales Growth

HOPKINTON, Mass., Feb. 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that AutomationDirect.com, a leading online superstore of industrial controls products, has standardized on EMC^® VMAX^® 10K with FAST^™ VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) and other EMC software. AutomationDirect.com is leveraging these EMC technologies to drive rapid business expansion and reduce costs while rolling out strategic initiatives, including disaster recovery, virtualized desktop computing and Big Data analytics.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Efficiency — By consolidating 50 storage devices onto VMAX 10K, AutomationDirect.com has decreased its data center footprint by 50% while increasing storage utilization by 160%.
• Cost Savings — With FAST VP, AutomationDirect.com has reduced the time spent managing storage to almost zero while improving performance to support rapid business growth.
• Simplified Administration — AutomationDirect.com's IT staff have reduced time spent on storage provisioning by 5X, freeing up valuable resources.
• Improved Availability — Frequent periods of downtime lasting an hour or more have completely disappeared since AutomationDirect.com standardized on VMAX.
• Enabled Business Growth  — VMAX 10K has enabled AutomationDirect.com to roll out its Big Data analytics strategy to streamline the product launch process from weeks to just days.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

AutomationDirect.com was experiencing tremendous business growth.  Its decentralized IBM storage infrastructure had become highly inefficient and lacked the performance and reliability it required.

After reviewing solutions from EMC, Hitachi, IBM, NetApp and 3Par, AutomationDirect.com selected EMC VMAX 10K powerful, trusted and smart storage and FAST VP automated storage tiering software to optimize overall performance and efficiency—while leveraging the expertise of EMC Global Services.  In addition, the company is implementing EMC RecoverPoint™ continuous data protection and VMware^® vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager (SRM) solutions to enable disaster recovery with replication of its storage and virtual machines to a remote VMAX 10K.

Approximately 80% of AutomationDirect.com's server infrastructure is virtualized using VMware vSphere^™.  EMC VMAX 10K stores 200 VMware virtual machines running Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Epicor Prophet 21 enterprise resource planning (ERP), and PathGuide Latitude warehouse management system, among other applications including its homegrown Big Data Analytics application.

Customer Quotes:

Trace Nabors, Systems Administrator, AutomationDirect.com

"Since leveraging FAST VP to automatically tier data, we are spending much less time and money on storage. We are achieving the performance we need without distributed storage systems sitting in the data center taking up unnecessary and precious space."

"With the majority of our business coming from our web site, system availability is critical to our revenue flow. Since implementing VMAX 10K, the availability of our IT infrastructure has been phenomenal.  We haven't experienced any of the availability issues we used to have with our previous solution."

"We now have the performance and scalability to roll out Big Data analytics. With a new master data management system, we now have better control over our information and streamlined the product launch process from weeks to days. It provides us a lot more flexibility as far as what we sell, how quickly we can sell it, and where we sell it. The VMAX 10K has opened up a lot of opportunities to grow our business."

"We are much more confident virtualizing our bigger applications, like the ERP and warehouse management, on the VMAX 10K platform because of EMC's tight integration with VMware. The VMAX 10K provides us with the consistently, high performance and uptime our mission-critical applications demand."

"The integration between VMware and VMAX 10K makes it easy to scale the infrastructure to support our business growth. With our IBM arrays, I always worried about space and constantly checking the controllers. Instead of working at least five hours a week on storage administration, I spend zero time with the VMAX 10K."

Additional Resources:

• Read the Customer Profile
• Learn more about EMC VMAX
• 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 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, VMAX 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