Rotary International Transforms IT with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Rotary International, a leading global humanitarian service organization, has transformed its IT infrastructure and standardized on EMC storage and backup and recovery technologies. With 90% of its IT environment virtualized, Rotary has built a solid foundation for improving the availability of its mission-critical applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle PeopleSoft, SAP business intelligence and Avectra netFORUM customer relationship management (CRM), while boosting the performance, efficiency and scalability of its IT infrastructure.

Rotary has implemented EMC^® VNXe^™, EMC Isilon®, EMC Avamar® and EMC RecoverPoint™ as well as VMware vSphere™ and is using a VCE™ Vblock^™ Infrastructure Platform that integrates EMC VNX™ unified storage, VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud technologies and Cisco networking and Unified Computing System (UCS) technologies.  Rotary is using its Vblock platform for its mission-critical applications and primary storage, while leveraging a VNXe storage system at a second facility to replicate data.

Customer Benefits:

• Simplified Management—Rotary has reduced everyday system management time by 25% since transforming its IT infrastructure.
• Strengthened Data Protection—With EMC Avamar, Rotary has eliminated tape and reduced the window for full backups from 72 hours to just two hours, a 32X improvement in time to backup.
• Predictable Performance—Rotary's "FLASH 1st" strategy using EMC's FAST™ (fully automated storage tiering) Suite on its Vblock platform ensured that the most utilized data was stored on the highest performing media, including flash drives.
• Improved Efficiency—After transforming its IT infrastructure, Rotary reduced time to deliver new projects to its internal clients from days to hours, enabling IT staff to be more proactive in supporting Rotary's overall humanitarian mission.
• Managing Digital Assets – EMC Isilon scale-out NAS delivers increased performance, capability and scalability for Rotary's growing digital assets.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

With greater use of digital media in its program promotion and demand for speedier grants' management, Rotary saw its data volume grow approximately 400% in just 18 months. To handle this massive data growth, Rotary's lean IT staff needed to simplify manageability while enabling cost-effective scalability and maintaining high performance.

A long-time EMC and VMware customer, Rotary decided to transform its IT environment in the second quarter of 2011.  Rotary selected EMC Isilon during the second quarter of 2011 to better manage its growing digital assets to complement its existing EMC Avamar solution back- up its entire IT infrastructure, having eliminated all tape from its IT environment.  

The final stage of Rotary's transformation included the adoption of a fully integrated converged infrastructure.  Their VCE Vblock platform brings together leading storage, networking, server and virtualization technologies to support mission-critical workloads with the highest levels of performance, availability and simplified management of the infrastructure. To maximize the performance of its applications, Rotary is using the EMC FAST Suite on its Vblock to employ a "FLASH 1st" strategy, ensuring that the most important, active data is stored on Flash drives for maximum performance, while older, inactive data is stored on inexpensive, high capacity drives for optimal total cost of ownership.

Customer Quotes:

Jon Shulda, SAN and VMware Administrator, Rotary International

On IT Transformation:

"We needed to transform our IT infrastructure and processes to better support our strategic goals of increasing visibility of the Rotary brand. Leveraging EMC, VMware and VCE, many of our internal IT resources have transitioned away from an operational role to focus more on delivering new projects to our internal and external clients. Time to deliver underlying infrastructure for new projects has been reduced from a couple days to just a few hours in most cases; allowing us to be more proactive to the needs of organization . We're also able to ensure our mission-critical applications like SQL Server, SharePoint and Oracle are well-protected and scale to new data loads."

On its Storage Environment:

"The VNXe was a breeze to implement. We were out of the box and production-ready in about two hours.  EMC Unisphere™ allows us to manage all our resources with a single interface. We can easily manage our infrastructure on a daily basis and leverage Unisphere's features when performing system upgrades. "

"Provisioning storage on the Vblock platform has improved greatly after implementing a 'FLASH 1^st' strategy because EMC FAST VP automatically distributes data onto the right tier of storage and expands and contracts virtual storage pools as needed. As a result, we've reduced the time we spend on day-to-day system management by 25%.  Despite our IT infrastructure growing by 400% in the past 18 months our IT staff has remained the same size and can manage the growth easily with our EMC infrastructure."

"EMC's close partnership with VMware, Cisco and VCE ensures all products are working in harmony. We know EMC will stand behind the entire solution.  We rely on the Vblock platform to support our mission-critical applications and we have complete confidence in its ability to meet our strict SLA's."

"We also rely on EMC Isilon to provide high-performance, low-latency storage to meet our multimedia initiatives need. Isilon integrated seamlessly into our environment and has proven to be a reliable solution to manage our multimedia files, allowing us to grow seamlessly as our multimedia assets grow." 

On Backup and Eliminating Tape

"In addition, EMC Avamar continues to be a key part of our infrastructure and has been for a number of years.  Before we implemented Avamar, our full tape backups would run for more than 72 hours and often included failed backups. Now, after completely eliminating tape from our environment and with Avamar, we have achieved 92% data deduplication with Avamar, and most of our backups complete in just two hours."

Additional Resources:

• Customer Profile: Read more about Rotary's unified storage and backup and recovery solutions
• Learn more about VNXe, Unisphere, Isilon, RecoverPoint and Avamar
• Learn more about VCE and Vblock Infrastructure Platforms
• 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, VNXe, VNX, Isilon, Unisphere and Avamar 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