MSP Safe Systems Calls on EMC VNX and VNXe for Virtualization

EMC
Corporation announced that Safe Systems, Inc., a
managed service provider for community financial institutions, selected EMC VNX
unified storage over NetApp and HP.

Safe Systems is using EMC VNX and EMC VNXe
unified storage and VMware vSphere virtualization solutions to meet demand for its managed and network-based services through a 100% virtualized
private cloud infrastructure.


Customer Benefits:

• Better efficiency and simplicity – Storage management time was
  reduced by 90%. Storage administration, which once required 10 hours per week,
  now only requires an hour per week – freeing more resources for development of
  client services.
  Increased agility – storage can now be scaled out to support
  fast-growing databases in just 10-minutes.
  Consolidated infrastructure – Data center footprint was
  reduced by 40% with the FAST Suite, flash drives and high capacity NL-SAS
  drives in a 100% virtualized infrastructure.

Safe Systems was looking to help its clients operate more
efficiently when using their services. To enable their clients to optimize the desired efficiency, Safe Systems
decided to deploy a private cloud computing model by virtualizing its IT
environment. 

Brendan McGowan, Vice President of Technical Services, Safe
Systems, said, "We began our private cloud journey with virtualization but
found that our old storage infrastructure was holding us back because it wasn’t
scaling cost-effectively. We evaluated EMC, NetApp, HP and other vendors and
concluded that EMC VNX unified storage offered the richest feature set at a
very competitive price-with the best integration with VMware software."

"Since moving to EMC VNX, we’re able to deliver our
very predictable service levels and response times even though our workloads
are constantly fluctuating. We manage everything from network monitoring
systems that shoot out anti-virus updates to 20,000 endpoints as well as spikes
in our SQL Server and Exchange environments. EMC VNX is able to support our
unpredictable IT infrastructure with ease. Additionally, we’ve deployed a ‘FLASH
1st’ strategy where, with just a few flash drives and the FAST Suite, we’re
able to automatically manage ensure that the most highly active data is served
from flash drives using FAST Cache or FAST VP. Lastly, we save on ‘physical’
space in our data center. Without ‘FLASH 1st’ and virtualization, we’d require
about 40-times more real estate to deliver our current level of services,"
said McGowan. "For example, seven flash drives replaced 100 x 15k
spindles-that’s a dramatic savings!" 

Safe Systems decided to use VNX for its enterprise
infrastructure to deliver hosted services to customers and its internal
operations, while using VNXe for its on-premise solution for customers.

"The shared storage options that were available to us
before VNXe made it difficult for our customers to afford an entire
solution," said McGowan. "With VNXe, we can now offer services with
the features and scalability that our customers demand."

Safe Systems also implemented EMC Unisphere across its
complete VNXe and VNX infrastructure to help focus developing new services for
its customers while decreasing the time spent on storage administrative
tasks. 

McGowan stated: "Simplicity was a key benefit that we
saw from implementing our VNX, from basic storage administration to scalability. We spend about an hour a week on basic
storage admin now-compared with at least 10 hours before we moved to the VNX
family. It’s just a whole lot simpler to manage with Unisphere. We’ve had certain databases that overwhelmed
our old infrastructure. The ability to scale out the storage behind them
quickly was a requirement for us. With VNX and VMware software, it’s simple to
add more disks or create a new storage location, and then move that workload to
the new location-in just a few clicks."

McGowan added: "Safe Systems is a small company. We
don’t have the resources to be experts on every technology. EMC has helped us
to develop our business and accelerate our adoption of cloud. And as EMC and
VMware develop new features and technologies, we know they’ll be integrated
before any other vendor."

Safe Systems relies on EMC VNX and VMware vSphere to deliver
services to clients and support its own operations. Safe Systems’ most
demanding applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server databases, run on EMC VNX
unified storage, and leverage the benefits of flash drive and EMC FAST Cache
for performance optimization. Safe Systems provides clients solutions based on EMC VNXe unified storage and VMware. EMC Unisphere software
provides an interface for provisioning, monitoring and
managing storage.