State of Indiana Boosts Data Center Performance 27% with EMC Symmetrix VMAX

HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC® Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that the State of Indiana's Office of Technology has consolidated its information infrastructure on EMC Symmetrix® VMAX™, the world's most powerful, trusted and smart enterprise storage, with Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP). The State selected the EMC solution to support its mission-critical applications and has dramatically improved the performance, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its datacenter operations.

EMC ranks as the #1 storage choice for Oracle, Microsoft and other mission critical environments according to a new global end user survey by IDC(1).  The survey ranks storage vendors based on customer deployment patterns within the most widely-used enterprise applications. According to the IDC report, more customers choose EMC storage than any other vendor's for their SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Home Directories environments.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Performance—The State of Indiana has increased performance of its datacenter storage infrastructure by 27% as a result of implementing VMAX with FAST VP to intelligently automate the ideal placement of data across various disk drive tiers for maximum performance, utilization and efficiency. 
• Improved Efficiency—By consolidating onto a single, powerful VMAX system, the State of Indiana has increased capacity by 30% while cutting system footprint in half and reducing power and cooling demand by more than 50%.
• Improved Productivity—The State of Indiana has reduced the number of administrators needed for storage maintenance, freeing them up for other more strategic projects.  What used to consume the time of one and a half administrators now requires less than one.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

The Indiana Office of Technology (IOT), which manages the technology infrastructure for the governor's office and executive branch agencies as well as sets direction for information technology for all of State government, experienced challenges managing its IT infrastructure due to high data growth of 30% annually.  With mandates from government officials to run government more efficiently, IOT needed to consolidate onto a more powerful tiered enterprise storage platform that could scale to meet is data growth while improving IT staff productivity.

The Office of Technology implemented a VMAX with FAST VP for its ability to scale and meet the demands of its growing IT environment and support its mission-critical applications including Oracle databases, Microsoft Exchange email and Microsoft SQL Server databases, as well as in-house applications developed with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

The State also deployed a second VMAX for disaster recovery at a second data center located in southern Indiana. Additionally, it uses EMC replication solutions, such as SRDF®, TimeFinder®, RecoverPoint, HomeBase™ and Replication Manager for business continuity.

Customer Quotes:

Jim Rose, Enterprise Architect and Manager – Storage Services, Indiana Office of Technology

"EMC storage is incredibly reliable, so when we decided to consolidate our existing systems onto a single, tiered enterprise platform, Symmetrix VMAX was the platform we trusted. It has helped us transform the way we manage our storage infrastructure in a cost effective manner while improving the quality of our services. With EMC's sophisticated replication technologies, such as SRDF and RecoverPoint, we trust that we'd be able to recover all of our critical applications at our remote site if a disaster were to significantly damage our infrastructure."

"We've consolidated four systems onto one powerful Symmetrix VMAX, increasing our total capacity by 30% while reducing the number of disk drives we need in half.  Using fewer disk drives has helped us reduce our power and cooling demand by more than 50%, which has reduced our power and cooling costs tremendously."

"FAST VP has made it very easy for us to allocate storage and utilize our capacity in the most efficient way. It's so smart that we just click and forget about it. As a result, we've seen performance gains of 27% while reducing our admin time by 50% on activities such as storage allocation and performance analysis.  What used to consume the time of one and a half administrators now requires less than one. Our staff can instead spend more time architecting new solutions."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VMAX
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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.

(1) IDC, "Storage Users Demand Study 2011 - Spring Edition: Unlocking the Minds of Storage Users" (September 2011 / Doc # 230148)

EMC Symmetrix VMAX and VMAX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries.  Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation