Coupons Chose EMC CLARiiON CX3 and Navisphere

EMC Corporation announced that Coupons, Inc.‘s information infrastructure reliably and securely supports millions of daily Microsoft SQL Server database transactions for its online, printable coupon business at the company’s new datacenter.

"Our business has grown rapidly," said Ravi Keswani, Vice President of Engineering for Coupons, Inc. "Last year alone, our platform delivered consumer savings worth over $250 million on over $1 billion worth of products, driving a print volume increase in excess of 700%. Our information infrastructure needed to be simple and straightforward for our end users, while supporting our complex and highly transactional, proprietary system."

Coupons, Inc., the global leader in printable coupon solutions, helps premier consumer brands and retailers, such as Johnson & Johnson, General Mills and Kraft Foods, reach consumers on thousands of Web sites, in over 10 countries, with the most flexible, effective and secure alternative to offline-delivered coupons. In the last three years, Coupons, Inc.’s transactional storage increased over 110% and its backup and storage environment needs increased by more than 400%. Consequently, when building its new datacenter, Coupons, Inc. evaluated numerous technology vendors for a storage area network (SAN) solution that would accommodate the company’s high performance, reliability, scalability and manageability requirements.

"Our platform enables the printing of currency-like documents, in a highly-controlled, extremely high-volume environment, so we needed a reliable and secure infrastructure that could handle our explosive growth," said Keswani. "During our evaluation process, EMC put the best people forward and invested a tremendous amount of time and resources to demonstrate how their technologies would best address our demanding transactional, volume and performance requirements."

Following its extensive evaluation process, Coupons, Inc. chose an EMC CLARiiON CX3 networked storage system to provide the high-performance, high-capacity and superior level of protection needed to meet the company’s demanding workload, reliability and scalability requirements. The CLARiiON system also includes a comprehensive set of built-in features that can help CLARiiON customers more effectively control access to their systems and better secure information. To optimize SAN performance and efficiency, Coupons, Inc. also implemented the EMC Navisphere Management Suite to manage and monitor its CLARiiON system. As a result, the EMC information infrastructure optimizes the consumer experience by providing the storage space and processing power to support the company’s rapidly increasing number of simultaneous print sessions and coupons printed per session.

"We weren’t just looking for a storage area network, we were looking for a Microsoft SQL Server specific solution," said Keswani. "Not only were they willing to partner with us, but EMC surpassed the competition with its suite of SQL management tools and services. Today, EMC is tightly integrated with Microsoft SQL in 100% of our business critical transaction systems, spinning on EMC CLARiiON."