Energy Utility Walton EMC Runs on Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced that GA-based Walton Electric Membership Corporation (Walton EMC), one of the nation’s largest electric cooperatives, uses NexentaStor, its OpenSDS platform, in conjunction with VMware, Inc. to save on storage and maintenance costs.

Walton EMC one of the largest of almost 1,000 electric cooperatives in the country and supplies energy to more than 122,000 residential, business and industrial accounts in 10 northeast GA counties. The company is known for reliable energy and electric services, delivered, with customer care.

With only six people in the IT group out of 370 employees, Andy Hill, director of information services, Walton EMC, doesn’t have a lot of extra time or resources to be worried about storage. His number one concern is to ensure that they are using their technology budget wisely. Hill and his team turned to SDS by Nexenta and standard storage hardware from Nexsan to replace aging physical storage arrays. The result has been performance, less maintenance and lower TCO.

“I’m interested in systems that require little management,” said Hill. “The Nexenta Software-Defined Storage system falls into that basket. Some IT systems are promised that way, but in the end they aren’t. For us using Nexenta, it’s literally been that way all along.“

“Stories like Walton EMC are commonplace with customers who use Nexenta. Organizations don’t need to dedicate staff resources to storage nor worry about performance or scalability,” said Craig Cagle, VP, GM of Americas, Nexenta. “The fact that Walton’s customers are stakeholders in the company makes SDS even more compelling as Hill and his team have a keen eye on the bottom line are making an investment in the future of their IT infrastructure.“

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