Luminex Slims Down Infrastructure With EMC and VMware

EMC Corporation announced that Luminex Corporation, developer of biological testing for the life sciences industry, has implemented EMC and VMware solutions to reduce information infrastructure costs and improve business continuity.

James Zabawa, Director of Information Technology, Luminex, said: "Growing demand for our biological testing technologies has spurred a significant expansion of our information infrastructure. Our IT costs were growing and it was becoming more difficult to find space in our datacenter for new systems. With EMC and VMware, we achieved efficiency gains across the board and we’re using fewer servers and consuming less storage, which saves us money in capital investment, maintenance and power usage. Additionally, with the centralized environment and advanced software, it’s easier and less labor-intensive to manage and protect our data. We also reclaimed space in our datacenter, allowing us to postpone an expansion. If we had not consolidated onto EMC, our server expenditures alone would have exceeded our investment in EMC and VMware."

EMC Global Services designed and implemented the EMC and VMware infrastructure. Luminex applications, including Oracle enterprise resource planning, finance, Microsoft Exchange, internal ticketing and file serving are stored on an EMC CLARiiON CX3-20 storage area network (SAN). The company uses EMC DiskXtender software to archive files stored on CLARiiON to an EMC Centera content-addressed storage system reducing the cost of their primary storage. For data protection, Luminex leverages EMC Avamar deduplication backup software to realize significant cost savings and reduced backup windows. Using EMC RecoverPoint replication software, Luminex replicates VMware data on CLARiiON storage arrays from its Austin datacenter to its Toronto site to achieve the right recovery point and recovery time objectives.

"Downtime is not acceptable because we have orders, shipping, finance, manufacturing and field support all flowing through infrastructure 24×7," said Zabawa. "With RecoverPoint and VMware, we could experience a major datacenter failure and bring everything back up in minutes at our remote site 2,500 miles away. Adding in Avamar as our backup, we’ve also increased our ability to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations and audits because we can prove our data are available and safe."

To address growing backup windows and rising tape and disk costs, Austin-Texas-based Luminex replaced Symantec Backup Exec software and an automatic tape library with an EMC Avamar solution for source-based data deduplication and backup to remote offices and their datacenter.

Zabawa said: "Data deduplication has removed thousands of redundant files that were clogging our network and storage. For example, we have a server in a European satellite office that went from backing up 10 gigabytes to 500 megabytes. Rather than having ten copies of a presentation out on our network, it’s now one copy and we only back it up when it’s changed. With EMC deduplication and archiving, we’ve saved nearly $100,000 on employee time, disk and tapes in the last six months and our backup windows have gone from 24 to seven hours. Two full-time employees used to manage our tape backups, loading and unloading tapes, and shipping them offsite. Now, we require one full-time employee equivalent, which has freed up time to work on other important projects that were on the back burner for years."

Using VMware virtualization software, Luminex consolidated 60 servers to 14 Dell blade servers running as 60 virtual machines that are stored on EMC CLARiiON. Luminex also uses VMware vCenter Server, VMware High Availability and VMware VMotion for streamlined management and data protection of its virtualized server environment.

Another critical challenge for Luminex was business continuity. A single server failure could bring down its critical ERP system for hours. A complete recovery of the entire infrastructure from tape could have taken weeks.

Zabawa added: "EMC RecoverPoint is a very intuitive piece of software. It simply plugs and plays into VMware, which allows management of the integration to be seamless. This integration allows us to maximize the use of each application, thus providing us a one stop solution for our business continuity needs."