Ameren Selects Two EMC VMAXs

EMC Corporation announced that Ameren Corp., a power company with 3.4 million electric and gas customers in Missouri and Illinois, selected Symmetrix VMAX to manage its  data growth in an Oracle database and custom application environment.



This supports Ameren's new initiatives, while accelerating its adoption of a private cloud infrastructure with VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies.

EMC was recently named by customers as the #1 storage choice for Oracle and other mission critical environments according to a survey by IDC. The survey ranks the storage vendors based on how end-users are deploying their technology with enterprise applications. In addition, EMC was also ranked as the top vendor for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, SAP, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Home Directories.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Savings: Reduced annual capital expenses by 50% using EMC's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST).
• Improved Performance: Increased transactional performance by 30% and batch processing performance by nearly 20% using EMC VMAX.
• Reduced Footprint: Consolidating on VMAX enabled Ameren to achieve power and cooling savings of 28%.
• Increased Scalability: Ameren can now scale its data center to handle unpredictable growth from smart grid and business analytics.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

With 100 terabytes of data being added to its infrastructure each year, Ameren was struggling to keep up with its data growth and increasing IT management costs while advancing its VMware virtualization and cloud computing strategy. Recognizing that emerging smart grid applications would increase data volumes even further, the company needed a way to reduce costs without limiting its ability to grow. After assessing its requirements and considering solutions from EMC, IBM, Hitachi and NetApp, Ameren selected EMC VMAX for its performance, intelligent management, scalability and cost-efficiency.

To meet its need for increased scalability and performance, Ameren deployed a VMAX storage system with enterprise Flash, FC and SATA drives, while also taking advantage of EMC FAST to reduce costs.

To maximize uptime, Ameren utilizes EMC SRDF/A software, which replicates data between the VMAX system in the company's production data center and a second VMAX in its disaster recovery and development data center 100 miles away. Ameren manages its VMAX environment using EMC ControlCenter, Symmetrix Manager and Symmetrix Optimizer to simplify system configuration, monitor and control SRDF replicas, and optimize performance.

John Hughes, Director of Hardware Infrastructure, Ameren Corp. said: "We had a sprawling shared-disk environment that didn't scale cost-effectively and used a lot of power. We chose EMC VMAX because it could drastically reduce our data center footprint, lower our power demand and fit our cost model.

"With VMAX and FAST, we were able to move a number of our key applications onto lower-cost disk and maintain good performance. It's a no-brainer - by tiering, we've lowered our annual working capital 50%.

"As an energy company, we're very focused on conservation. With VMAX and VMware, we've lowered our energy demands by 28%, resulting in much greener data centers. We also can allocate capacity much more quickly and dynamically to better manage growth. Even though we can't predict our exact future requirements, VMAX provides us with the elasticity and growth capabilities to support whatever smart grid and business analytics initiatives come down the road.

"Our benchmarking showed that we improved transactional performance by 30%, which directly affects our responsiveness to customer calls. We also increased batch processing performance by 20%, enabling us to now complete our billing cycles in as little as four hours compared to up to 8 hours with our previous storage solution.

"VMAX is helping us to become 85% virtualized in the near future. VMAX is one of our key building blocks to embracing cloud.

"With VMAX's excellent reliability and intelligent management tools, we're spending less time on troubleshooting. In fact, our after-hours service calls dropped by half."