7,000 Customers Embrace EMC Disk-Based Backup and Archive Products

More companies and organizations are leveraging EMC Corporation‘s disk-based data protection and archive solutions – with features like data de-duplication – which help customers lower cost by simplifying the management of expanding environments, meeting new backup requirements and controlling explosive data growth.

EMC is providing more than 1,500PBs (petabytes) of data protection to more than 7,000 customers using EMC Avamar data de-duplication backup and recovery software, EMC Disk Library backup-to-disk systems and EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) systems (through the end of Q3 2008). Customers have achieved as high as 90% storage efficiency using EMC de-duplication technologies.

Year to date, EMC Avamar has achieved triple-digit growth as more customers continue to leverage data de-duplication in backup-challenged areas like VMware Infrastructure environments, remote/branch offices, and backup window or bandwidth constrained data centers, without overhauling their entire environment.

With the EMC Disk Library family, EMC is the market leader in open systems virtual tape libraries, providing non-disruptive backup-to-disk to organizations of all sizes. This year, Forrester cited EMC as a leader in its Q1 Wave Report on the Virtual Tape Library (VTL) market based on the largest installed base and its broad ecosystem interoperability. By adding new capabilities that customers are asking for – like data de-duplication and energy efficiency (low power drives, spin down), as well as LAN backup-to-disk support – the company continues advance its leadership position in backup-to-disk platforms.

As a pioneering archiving platform, EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) provides customers with simple, affordable, and secure data archiving, leveraging data de-duplication to ensure that multiple copies of the same data are archived and stored only once. Centera has played a critical part in driving EMC’s philanthropic efforts to improve and preserve the world’s information heritage, particularly with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and the Herzogin Anna Amalia Library. In addition, EMC is also playing an active role in driving new industry standards like the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) specification, which helps customers lower cost through multi-vendor interoperability.
David Donatelli, President of EMC’s Storage Division, said: "EMC offers the broadest portfolio of backup, recovery and archiving solutions in the industry today. Our range of technologies complements each other and can also stand alone to meet a diverse range of requirements. Our market leadership in EMC Disk Library and EMC Centera combined with the rapid growth of EMC’s Avamar family gives us a distinct advantage over large and small competitors that can only solve particular pieces to the vast and challenging IT puzzle. And today, we continue to strengthen our portfolio with key new capabilities that allow our customers to do more with less of a footprint, while reducing cost and risk."

Customers Rely on and Turn to EMC’s Backup and Archive Portfolio

Republic Bank
– a U.S. commercial bank with more than $3.1 billion in assets and 45 banking centers in Kentucky, Indiana, Florida and Ohio – needed to evolve its data protection strategy to reduce its information infrastructure footprint, while reigning in costs.

Sean O’Mahoney, Vice President of Technology Services, said: "Like other companies and organizations with multiple branch offices, we were challenged with ways to improve our backup systems. EMC came in, understood our challenges and provided the right disk-based solutions that are helping us reduce cost, mitigate risk and improve operations. We’re in the process of revamping our branch office and data center backup strategies, using EMC Avamar, EMC Disk Library 3D and EMC NetWorker. With a number of our branch offices, we’re already taking advantage of Avamar to backup and de-duplicate data before it’s sent back to the data center to an EMC Avamar Data Store. Not only have we significantly reduced backup-related WAN traffic, but we’ve reduced media costs as well as help desk calls to resolve tape issues."

O’Mahoney added: "We’re also leveraging disk-based backup and data de-duplication in the data center by using EMC Disk Library 3D 1500s and EMC NetWorker. In one section of this deployment using the de-duplication capabilities in the Disk Library 3D, we’ve already achieved a significant reduction in the data we’ve backed up, going from 3.7TBs down to 280GBs. With both deployments, we’ve seen a great reduction in our backup windows, increased performance and tremendous restore. As we continue to standardize on EMC’s disk-based backup solutions for each of our environments, we hope to reduce our dependence on tape during the first half of 2009."

Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC) – a state-of-the-art medical services and healthcare provider – turned to EMC to greatly reduce its dependency on backup to tape with a backup-to-disk solution leveraging data de-duplication.

Adam Bates, System Administrator for MGMC, said: "Serving a 13-county region in Central Iowa, it’s imperative that our backup and recovery processes operate smoothly while reducing costs from an IT and operations perspective. As our application information was growing rapidly, our former tape infrastructure could not facilitate the proper service level agreements we needed to support for the hospital. By replacing the tape solution with an EMC Disk Library 3D 3000, not only have we reduced – through data de-duplication – the amount of Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Web server data by more than 22 times, but we’ve reduced our backup windows by 300%. In addition, when we’ve recently had to recover data, it took a matter of minutes versus the multiple hours – potentially days – it used to take with tape. As a trusted partner, EMC and its disk-based backup solution have enabled us to reduce our IT footprint and practically eliminate the need for tape, but just as important allocate an entire IT personnel’s responsibility to other pressing IT needs."

The California Department of Justice through the Attorney General sees that the laws of the state are uniformly and adequately enforced. Working with EMC, this state agency has developed a robust automated archive system for a number of its critical documents.

Byron Leman, Storage Administration Section Manager, of the California Department of Justice, said: "Working with EMC, we have been able to develop a unique automated archive system that’s enabled us to keep a number of applications and unstructured data easily accessible while highly available through replication. Currently, we archive all of our digital fingerprints and criminal history data to EMC Centera and replicate an exact copy off-site for disaster recovery. By moving this data to Centera, we are able provide secure and fast access to critical information. As a result, this allows our department to do a better job in ensuring justice, safety, and liberty for everyone."

Burris Logistics operates a network of frozen food warehousing and distribution systems in the eastern United States. In order to maintain the highest level of internal operations and customer service, the company turned to EMC to improve its backup infrastructure.

Bill Poore, Director of Information Technology at Burris Logistics, said: "It is essential that we support 24-by-7 warehouse operations and the transparency of the backup process is a critical part of that support. The legacy backup environment consisted of tape and disparate products protecting our Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. After consistently missing backup windows and impacting warehouse operations, EMC helped us consolidate and optimize our backup environment by leveraging disk-based protection, de-duplication and replication. We have standardized our backup process using EMC NetWorker software and an EMC Disk Library 3D 1500 to protect mission critical applications across all three operating systems."

Bill added: "The deployment of the backup solution was outstanding as we were able to quickly and easily configure and tune the system to make it run optimally in our data center. We have significantly reduced our backup windows and our ability to recover data. For example, we have cut our Microsoft Exchange backups from 14 hours to 2 and 1/2 hours. The DL3D enables us to run simultaneous backups due to the virtual drive capabilities and performance of the Disk Library. EMC clearly understood our specific requirements, delivered the appropriate solution to transform our backup infrastructure, and enabled us to focus our efforts on business projects."

The Manila Electric Company, locally known as MERALCO, is the Philippine’s largest distributor of electrical power with a franchise serving 22 cities and 89 municipalities, providing electricity to a quarter of the country’s entire population with a total land area that produces 50% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

The incumbent Chief Information Officer of MERALCO, Mr. Jamie R. Camacho, said: "With more than four million customers served on a daily basis, MERALCO’s information infrastructure needs are mission-critical and unparalleled in the utilities industry. For our information data protection requirements, we’ve implemented two EMC Disk Library 3Ds with approximately 100 TB usable capacity and EMC NetWorker as the replication and backup software. EMC’s backup and recovery solutions helped us to strengthen our data protection, streamline backup and recovery through data de-duplication, and meet a wide range of service levels, even for the largest data volumes. This reaffirms MERALCO’s vision in embracing next generation technology not only in achieving its objectives but also in realizing the company’s role to implementing more efficient and eco-friendly systems."