TTX Chops Power Use in Half and Datacenter Space Over 75%, Eliminates Tape Management

HOPKINTON, Mass., July 28 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that TTX Company has deployed EMC® and VMware® products and solutions to serve as the foundation of the company's virtual datacenter and next generation backup and recovery implementation.  The new datacenter has enabled TTX, North America's leading provider of railcars and related freight car management services, to sharpen its competitive edge by speeding access to critical business information; virtualizing 98% of its servers; and significantly reducing operational costs associated with its newly streamlined backup and recovery processes.  

"We depend on fast and accurate information to stay ahead of our competition and differentiate our services," said Rob Zelinka, TTX's Director IT Infrastructure.  "Previously, it was difficult to monitor and generate reports on all aspects of our nearly 200,000 railcars' performance, reliability and availability.  With EMC as the foundation, we can capture and readily access this information to rapidly respond to customers' needs and lead with competitive bids."

TTX evaluated technologies from NetApp, H-P, IBM and Compellent, when transitioning from a mainframe to a fully virtualized, open systems server environment, and chose to work with EMC – the preferred storage vendor by leading CIOs for virtualized server environments.  To support its environment, TTX chose EMC CLARiiON® network storage systems as the foundation of the information infrastructure to flexibly scale to support the changing needs of the business in the future.  TTX also embraced VMware virtualization technologies, which reduced its siloed environment of 500 physical servers to 40 optimized servers.  The company is now 98% virtualized.  

To dramatically reduce the amount of disk storage needed to retain and protect enterprise data and to maximize the benefits of its new virtualized storage infrastructure, TTX deployed a next generation disk-based backup and recovery strategy centered on EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage systems.  Together, EMC and VMware helped TTX not only to simplify its environment and enable its small team of employees to focus on business critical issues, but also to reduce power consumption by more than 50% and its overall datacenter foot print by nearly 79%.  

"We were ecstatic when EMC acquired Data Domain," said Zelinka.  "Data Domain was already a well established and robust technology, but we knew the tremendous value it offers would be even greater when integrated into EMC."

Data Domain deduplication storage enabled TTX to streamline and more easily manage its backup data, which can now also be efficiently replicated and retrieved over existing networks for disaster recovery and consolidated tape operations using EMC Data Domain Replicator software.  Previously, TTX spent thousands of dollars a month and required three shifts of employees to manage 20,000 tapes offsite and respond in the event of an outage.  

Additionally, by deploying EMC RecoverPoint and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, TTX automated its disaster recovery processes for its physical and virtual environments to eliminate complex manual recovery steps and provide continuous data protection and remote replication for on-demand protection and recovery.  This dramatically improved TTX's service level agreements and reduced its operational costs.

"While cutting-edge technology is important, we look for partners that truly understand our business and our needs today and tomorrow," said Zelinka.  "EMC and VMware are tremendous partners because they know where were going and have solutions to help us get there."  

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information.  Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Data Domain and CLARiiON are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc.  Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation