Belgian Municipality Swaps NetApp for EMC VNXe

EMC Corporation announced that the
government of Balen, Belgium replaced its NetApp, Inc. solution with EMC VNXe unified
storage for its simplicity, efficiency, and
affordability.

As a result, the Belgian municipality achieved a 25% operational efficiency
boost and enabled more responsive, cost-effective government services for its
citizens. With an IT infrastructure that is 99% virtualized, the VNXe provides
simpler provisioning of Balen’s VMware virtual machines, while reducing power
and cooling costs.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Efficiency: The VNXe unified storage system provided Balen
  with a 25% increase in operational efficiency compared to its previous NetApp
  storage solution.
• Increased Scalability: Balen has doubled the number of virtual
  servers running on its VNXe with room for continued growth.
• Improved Responsiveness: The integration between VNXe and VMware
  ESXI virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies enables Balen to
  deploy new virtual machines in just minutes – compared to days and sometimes
  weeks it took with NetApp.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Balen was virtualizing its server infrastructure with VMware ESXI,
but realized that its NetApp storage systems would require overhaul to keep
pace. The 21,000 citizen municipality considered expanding the NetApp system
but found it would be more expensive than acquiring a new platform. Keeping
within its tight IT budget, and with the goal of meeting its scalability
demands at an affordable cost, Balen decided to deploy a new storage
infrastructure.

Balen needed a storage solution that provided greater capacity – yet
was simple to manage within a nearly 100% virtualized infrastructure. With the
help of EMC Velocity partner 3-IT, Balen selected VNXe unified storage.

Deployed in just two hours, the VNXe supports Balen’s municipal
government staff members with a range of applications, such as a time
registration system, running on 20 VMware virtual machines. To manage the VNXe
environment, Balen uses EMC Unisphere, which provides 
wizard-based storage provisioning and rapid deployment of VMware virtual
machines.

Bjorn Claes, System Administrator, Municipality of Balen, Belgium,
said: "The implementation of the
VNXe went really well. We installed the VNXe in just two hours, outside of the
normal workday. We were very pleased with the support from EMC and our local
partner, 3-IT. Their in-depth technical knowledge, flexibility and open
communications helped the project proceed smoothly."

"With NetApp, we were
limited in our ability to introduce new applications because of the cost and
time required to purchase physical servers. We can be more agile with EMC and
respond more quickly to the growing needs of our municipality. With our VNXe
and VMware infrastructure, we have the capacity and performance to continually
enhance the applications that our 110 staff members rely on to serve the
public."

"The VNXe provides the
capacity, performance and VMware integration to greatly expand our use of
virtual machines. The more virtual servers we implement, the greater the return
on our IT infrastructure investments. Since deploying the VNXe, we have doubled
the number of virtual machines in our environment and have implemented numerous
new projects while maintaining excellent performance. This would not have been
possible in our previous NetApp environment."

"With the VNXe, we have
become 25% more efficient in managing out storage environment and configuring
VMware data stores than with our previous NetApp solution. The big difference
is Unisphere, which makes it easy to work with both the VNXe and VMware
environments in a single interface. This is especially important since we only
have one IT administrator for the entire municipality."

"With the help of VNXe
and our broad use of virtualization, we have dramatically reduced the costs of
cooling and electricity, as well as our physical footprint."

"The reliability of the
VNXe has been great. Its redundant storage processors provide us with much
higher availability that our old NetApp systems, which is as important in
government as it is in business. All of our municipal services are dependent on
the IT infrastructure. Without it, our staff members are unable to perform
their jobs and provide critical services to the public."