eMeter Deploys Pure Storage FlashArray With VMware

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that eMeter, a Siemens Business and global
smart grid software platform provider located in Northern California, has
deployed the Pure Storage FlashArray to implement a shared services model for engineering, QA, support and training.

The new solution has allowed them to
provision eMeter application instances on-demand for a variety of use cases.
Based on the results of this implementation, eMeter plans to broaden the
deployment of the FlashArray within the engineering and IT infrastructure.

eMeter provides software that enables electric, gas and water
utilities to realize the full benefits of Smart Grid. Utilities
worldwide depend on eMeter Smart Grid Management software to reduce operational
costs, improve customer service and drive energy efficiency. The eMeter
application is a multi-tier web application, consisting of an Oracle database
server, web server, application server and data integration hub.

As eMeter grew, it found itself having to often support a diverse
set of engineering, QA, support, training and customer demo needs within its
environment. Each of these environments consisted of five separate physical
machines, and each took over three hours of dedicated administration time to
create. Environments needed to be
capable of scaling far beyond customer usage so that deployments could be
tested in QA and replicated in support.

To address these challenges, eMeter deployed the Pure Storage
FlashArray with VMware. The solution was implemented by virtualizing
independent database, application, web and integration servers with VMware,
running on a single FlashArray. This new solution has allowed
eMeter to provision full stack environments,
leveraging a shared model that delivers performance and scale to meet testing requirements.

"We simply could not have
done this on the filer we had," said Bryan Bond, senior systems
administrator at eMeter. "After
implementing Pure Storage, we are now CPU-bound on our hosts, and storage no
longer limits our scale. The data reduction results have been nothing short of
phenomenal – we looked at the numbers two or three times because we didn’t
believe them at first."

The consolidation, performance and flexibility achieved by deploying
the eMeter shared services with the Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware include:

• 15+ independent eMeter stacks (60+ individual VMs, consisting of
  Windows 7, Windows 2003, RedHat 4 and RedHat 5) consolidated onto 5 physical
  machines with room to grow
• 1.6TB of VMs reduced to 237GB on the FlashArray (6.7-to-1
  reduction)
• 23% increased database performance by virtualizing Oracle Per
  instance provisioning time reduced by 4x
• 2x improvement in VMware snapshot take/release time

"As users demand more
storage and application bandwidth, flash will become increasingly common in the
datacenter, due to its reliability, ultra-low latency and cost-efficiency,"
said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of product at Pure Storage. "For businesses like eMeter that need to
rapidly process large amounts of data, the Pure Storage FlashArray is a natural
fit, delivering the performance, flexibility and scalability without the added
complexity."