Foster Pepper Embraces EMC and VMware for Private Cloud

EMC Corporation announced that Foster Pepper PLLC, a Seattle-based law firm, deployed EMC unified storage and VMware virtualization solutions to virtualize its IT environment and achieve more simplicity and efficiency in its datacenter operations. In addition to the savings of time and cost, Foster Pepper anticipates that this move to private cloud computing will help the business extend its competitive edge and deliver the highest quality client service.

"We evaluated NetApp and other vendors, but found that EMC and VMware were the perfect fit for a medium-sized business like ours," said Brian Bosserman, Foster Pepper’s Network and Systems Operations Manager. "Through its simplified management, the combined EMC and VMware solution enabled me to shift my focus from troubleshooting to architecture planning, as well as enabling us to generate a significant cost savings by reducing hardware purchases, the need for space, and the power and cooling required in the datacenter."

As the foundation of its private cloud environment, Foster Pepper used VMware vSphere to simplify the creation of virtual machines and significantly consolidate its physical environment by converting the majority of its physical servers to nimble, smaller virtual machines stored on EMC Celerra unified storage system. This in combination with VMware VMotion enables the company to move a running virtual machine instantly from one server to another, undetectable to the user, to simplify live migrations and allow hardware maintenance and upgrades without downtime or disrupting business.

"We’ve nearly tripled the size of our environment while reducing our physical server count by 85 percent," said Bosserman. "From 55 production physical servers two years ago, we now run 130 virtual machines – 90 VMs on four production servers and 40 VMs on four test/development servers."

The company also began deploying EMC Celerra Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) software to automate data movement among different performance tiers of storage.

"EMC Celerra FAST will help us work more efficiently and deliver better client service by spending less time on management and matching the right-cost storage to the right application," said Bosserman. "This will help maximize our investment by fully utilizing disk capacity in the storage system."