Park Industries Acquires EMC VNXe Over IBM

EMC Corporation announced that Park Industries, Inc., a stone-fabrication
equipment company, selected EMC VNXe unified storage with VMware vSphere
virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies over IBM.

VNXe has provided Park Industries with 100% availability, improved application
performance and increased efficiency for its virtualized applications,
including Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange. VNXe has simplified Park
Industries’ storage administration, allowing its IT staff to transform itself
from a support organization to one that focuses on enabling the company’s
business growth.

Customer Benefits:

• Reduced
  Total Cost of Ownership: By displacing physical
  servers with virtual machines on VNXe, Park Industries saved $30,000 in OPEX
  annually by reducing power, cooling and storage administration costs.
• Improved Performance: VNXe increased Park Industries’ system performance by 100%,
  enabling applications to run faster, such as Microsoft SQL.
• Increased Availability: VNXe has delivered 100% availability for all of Park’s virtualized applications.

Customer Challenges and
Solution:
Park Industries’ previous IT environment consisted
of an increasing number of under-utilized servers, straining the company’s lean
IT staff and resources. Because of this strain, Park Industries was unable to
provide the latest application updates and operating systems to its end users
and deploying new IT solutions to support business growth. Park Industries was
spending an amount of time, including nights and weekends, to ensure
system availability, which was as low as 80% at times.

With the help of EMC Velocity Solution Provider, St. Croix
Solutions, Inc.,  Park Industries selected
VNXe unified storage, over IBM, for its simplicity, efficiency and
affordability – and industry integration with VMware. By consolidating its
storage, Park was able to improve application performance, ensure HA
and simplify administration while increasing hardware utilization and reducing
costs. The VNXe supports Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle’s JD Edwards ERP, Maximizer customer relationship management
and other applications.

Daniel Mettling, IT manager, Park Industries, said: "We evaluated both EMC and IBM when we were
looking to update our IT infrastructure. IBM offered us just a bunch of storage
without the integration with VMware that we get with EMC and VNXe. The reliability,
performance, efficiency and simplicity of VNXe made it the ideal choice for us.
Our customer service experience with EMC has been excellent."

"The availability of our
SQL Server environment is absolutely critical to our business. Downtime means we
can’t place sales orders, issue work orders for the shop floor or log service
calls. Since implementing VNXe, we’ve had 100% availability of SQL Server and
all other applications in our virtualized environment."

"By consolidating
everything onto VNXe, the performance of our infrastructure is twice-as-fast.
Before, pulling a 50-megabyte media file off the old server took up to ten
seconds. Now, VNXe delivers a media file in just five seconds. Having our
production SQL Server database on VNXe also accelerates processing of our order
management, finance and other critical applications. Email messages are
delivered more quickly. Everything is faster."

"Since virtualizing with
VMware and VNXe, we’ve improved utilization significantly allowing us to
leverage more value from our infrastructure. Before, processor utilization on
most of our servers averaged about one%. Now, we average ten% utilization on
fewer servers, which leaves us plenty of room to grow."

"By displacing physical
servers with VMs on VNXe, we’ve significantly reduced our power, cooling and
storage administration requirements, lowering our total cost of ownership by
$30,000 per year."

"The reliability and
simplicity of VNXe is helping us completely transform the role of IT at Park
from purely support to a partner to the business. Instead of fighting fires and
maintaining equipment, we’re able to focus on how IT can enable the business to
grow and meet its strategic objectives. It has definitely made us a better
company."