Scentsy Thrives with EMC VNX in VMware Virtualized Environment

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Scentsy Group, a rapidly-growing, international party-plan company dedicated to creating a social shopping experience, is using EMC^® VNX^™ unified storage for its "no compromise" ability to manage rapid expansion of its goal of a 100% virtualized information infrastructure. With a three-year revenue growth rate from 2007 to 2010 of 2,904%, Scentsy relies on EMC VNX unified storage with a FLASH 1st implementation to achieve performance and operational efficiencies using FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools), FAST Cache, and a tiered-drive architecture with Flash drives. Scentsy is also leveraging EMC backup and recovery solutions and VMware vSphere, View 4.5 and vCenter virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions to provide a simple, efficient and powerful solution for its growing IT infrastructure.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Performance—Since moving to VNX and employing a FLASH 1st architecture, Scentsy has achieved a 30% performance increase of its virtualized infrastructure.
• Improved Efficiency— The FAST Suite ensures Scentsy's data is automatically tiered to the most cost-effective drive capacity (e.g. SAS or NL-SAS) based on its pre-defined policies.
• Simplicity—Integration between VNX and VMware enable Scentsy to provide 10 new virtual desktops in 30 minutes or less—compared to what used to take weeks using physical PCs.
• Streamlined Backups—With EMC Avamar^®, Scentsy can backup its virtualized infrastructure in just a few hours each night—compared to more than 24 hours with their previous solution.
• Cost Savings – Since implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) strategy, Scentsy has seen a savings of 30-50% in physical hardware costs.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Scentsy faced IT infrastructure scalability challenges as it experienced tremendous business growth. To help manage this growth, Scentsy adopted VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions.  Scentsy implemented VMware View 4.5, vCenter and vSphere to manage its virtual servers and virtual desktops. At the same time, Scentsy was looking to increase the performance of its storage environment.

After extensive vendor evaluations, Scentsy standardized on EMC VNX unified storage with FAST Cache and FAST VP for its simplicity, efficiency and power. Additionally, EMC RecoverPoint software provides automated replication between two VNX systems located at data centers 1,600 miles apart for disaster recovery. Scentsy also implemented a new backup solution with EMC Avamar deduplication backup software and systems to backup its entire virtual infrastructure.

Customer Quotes:

Louie Smith, System Administrator, Scentsy, Inc.

"I really like that VNX lets us grow our storage infrastructure as fast as our rapidly expanding VMware environment.  With Scentsy's extremely fast growth the last three years, we require a powerful and agile solution to meet the global demand for our business."

"Because our company is growing so fast, there was no way we could deploy PCs to our employees fast enough. With the best-in-class integration between VMware and VNX, I can stand up 10 desktops in about 30 minutes, helping us deliver virtual desktops out to our users much faster. In the physical world, that would have taken weeks."

"As a global company, VDI's give us more control and security compared to physical PC's.  We've seen a cost savings of 30-50% in physical hardware costs and have reduced management time by hours each day.  We can fix a patch on the backend of our infrastructure in an hour for all of our VDI's when it previously took us an hour per physical PC."

"Since moving to EMC VNX, performance on our virtual servers has increased by 30%.  With FAST Cache and FAST VP we can maintain peak performance even during busy usage periods."

"With Avamar, we now complete full backups every night, including our virtual desktops and virtual machines. Before, it would take a whole day just to back up one server, but with Avamar, it takes just a few hours for everything. All in all, Avamar provides umbrella coverage for our entire environment, intuitive management, and quick recoveries."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VNX and Avamar
• Customer Profile: Scentsy
• 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, VNX and Avamar are 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