Incentium Embarks to Private Cloud With EMC and VMware

EMC Corporation announced that Incentium, LLC., provider of web-based incentive and loyalty programs to the Fortune 500 has deployed EMC and VMware solutions to virtualize, consolidate, backup and replicate its storage and server environments, achieving increased efficiency, simplified management and better data protection. 

Shawn Scott, Incentium’s Infrastructure Manager, said: "Our business was growing so fast that we were having trouble ramping up our IT infrastructure to keep up with business growth. By deploying EMC storage and information management and VMware virtualization, we’ve built a foundation for private cloud that is much more agile and efficient and protects our data to a much greater degree."

Based in Chattanooga, Tenn., Incentium virtualized 90 percent of its servers with VMware vSphere and consolidated its server-based storage onto an EMC CLARiiON system, providing the storage infrastructure for Microsoft Exchange email, SQL Server, SharePoint, CRM, Web and file serving, and 85 VMware virtual machines. Incentium also replaced Symantec Backup Exec with EMC Avamar to provide data deduplication, backup, recovery and replication of its physical and virtual servers. To enable disaster recovery, Incentium leverages EMC RecoverPoint for continuous remote replication of data to a remote data center 100 miles away.

With EMC and VMware, Incentium significantly increased simplicity, efficiency and data protection, including:

• Reducing the physical server count from 75 to 13
• Cutting the data center cooling usage and electrical power system load by 50 and 65 percent respectively
• Decreasing the overall storage capacity utilized from 80 to 20 terabytes
• Avoiding $100,000 in data center expansion costs
• Slashing daily full backups from 60 hours to 4 hours
• Decreased file recovery from days to seconds
• Reduced administrator backup time from nine hours weekly to 10 minutes
• Decreased backup capacity by 95 percent
• Shrunk the 24-hour recovery point objective to 15 minutes

"Virtualization has been wonderful because we can scale so fast," said Scott. "The VMware templates make it easy to add a new virtual machine in just about 30 minutes. With physical servers, it takes two to three weeks for them to be ordered, shipped and deployed. We’re now able to deliver the horsepower our internal organizations need to respond quickly to customer demand. Additionally, with our virtual data center, it’s simple to do upgrades, restore servers, and add capacity from any location that has Internet access."

While virtualization curtailed rampant physical server growth, Incentium needed to also update its backup and disaster recovery system.  

"We couldn’t keep up with our storage needs because our virtual deployment was growing so quickly. With EMC Avamar, we complete full backups every day in only four hours and with EMC RecoverPoint we can meet our recovery objectives in 15 minutes. Now we can concentrate on virtualizing the remaining 10 percent of our environment and other strategic initiatives."