French Pharmaceutical Group Sanofi Opts for EMC VPLEX

EMC Corporation announced that Sanofi, a pharmaceutical company, has
implemented EMC VPLEX virtual storage technology to transform Sanofi’s IT
environment by consolidating 26 data centers to only three and migrate 4,000
applications in order to increase the utilization, efficiency and agility of
its IT environment so that information can be shared, accessed and moved
within, across and between its data centers.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Utilization: VPLEX has enabled Sanofi to improve storage utilization by up to
  30%.
• Business Agility: More than 200 applications out of 4,000 have already been migrated
  to three new global data centers, avoiding 24 hours of downtime to date and
  accelerating Sanofi’s massive IT consolidation plan.
• Cost Savings: Sanofi expects to reduce operating costs by 20% after the migration
  of its 4,000 applications is complete.

Customer Challenges and
Solution:

As a result of a major acquisition and business growth,
Sanofi was struggling to manage its geographically dispersed IT infrastructure
that spanned 26 separate sites around the world. Additionally, Sanofi’s
employees were finding it increasingly difficult to access and share data – a
capability that is critical to advancing pharmaceutical research,
regulatory approvals and product distribution.

Sanofi implemented EMC VPLEX to migrate 4,000 applications to a
centrally managed IT infrastructure while consolidating its sprawling 26 data
centers to just three, now located in the US, France and Singapore.

With more
than 200 applications already migrated, Sanofi has achieved increased agility
in its data center. The ‘Federated AccessAnywhere’ technology inside VPLEX was
an enabler to achieving and expediting a massive IT consolidation – while
avoiding any downtime of production systems. This migration and new ability to
share, access and move information has reduced operating costs and
improving business agility.

In six months, EMC and systems integrator Accenture helped
Sanofi build its new IT infrastructure, complete with three data centers that
are now interconnected and operate as a global private cloud. Sanofi’s
private cloud leverages VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure
solutions and EMC unified storage.

Sebastian Roque, storage engineering manager, Sanofi Group, said: "We are very pleased with VPLEX. We can
perform migrations between our data centers extremely easily. In fact, we’ve
migrated 200 applications to date to the new data centers without the 24 hours
of downtime we would have endured with traditional migration methods. Our
massive consolidation of 4,000 total applications would be impossible without VPLEX,
and once completed, will have avoided us at least 2-3 weeks of downtime.

"Our storage assets are
shared as a single, centrally managed resource on our private cloud
infrastructure, regardless of what data center they’re located in. Our storage utilization
has improved by up to 30%, helping us to maximize the value of our investments
while postponing future storage expenditures.

"As part of our ongoing
IT transformation, VPLEX will help us to deliver IT services to numerous
business groups across Sanofi. We will reduce our operating costs by 20% and
increase overall efficiency once our migration is complete. With these savings,
we’ll be able to pour more IT resources into strategic projects that support
our scientists and healthcare customers.

"We chose EMC VPLEX
because it allows us to create a robust IT environment with seamless management
of our data regardless of where it resides. EMC’s extensive experience in the
data center gave us the confidence that we would have the right technology to
make this project a success."