North Carolina County Selecting EMC

EMC Corporation announced
that Mecklenburg County, North
Carolina’s most populous county with nearly one million residents, selected its
solutions to increase performance, efficiency and optimize backup
performance while decreasing costs.

Mecklenburg selected EMC VNX unified storage running the EMC FAST Suite to
boost the performance of its applications and automate tiering across the
array-driving down operational costs and simplifying management.

Mecklenburg extended its tiering strategy from the array to archival storage by
leveraging the EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance (CTA), maximizing efficiency and
mitigating the need for additional storage from the county government’s growing
file shares and Web servers. Mecklenburg is also improving backups with
Avamar deduplication backup software and system, transforming its approach to
data protection by decreasing backup capacity requirements and backup times.

EMC is ranked by customers across the globe as the #1 storage choice
for environments, according to the latest end-user study from IDC. The
survey ranks storage vendors based on customer deployment patterns within the
most widely-used enterprise applications. According to the IDC study, more
customers choose EMC storage than any other vendor’s for their Oracle,
Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, SAP, Business Intelligence and Analytics,
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Home Directory environments.

Customer Benefits:

• Automated Tiering and Performance Optimization: With FAST
  Suite, Mecklenburg has simplified storage management and reduced costs using
  software that tiers data to the most cost-effective drive type for its activity
  level, ensuring that Mecklenburg never has to compromise performance for
  budget.
• Cost Savings: By automatically tiering 90 days worth of inactive data
  from the array to archival storage, EMC CTA enabled Mecklenburg to reclaim 7TB
  of primary storage while avoiding the need for more capacity for CIFS file
  shares-saving $60,000 in capital expenditures.
• Improved Backups: With Avamar, Mecklenburg decreased its backup times
  by 90% going from 72 to 8 hours.

Customer Challenges and
Solution:
To manage through the economic recession, Mecklenburg’s county
government was required to reduce budgets and staff even as demand for IT
services increased. At the same time, capacity requirements
increased 75% in 18 months, maxing out available tape backup capacity managed
by Mecklenburg’s prior Symantec Backup Exec solution. The county’s data
retention policies also meant files were held for long, often indefinite
periods, further taxing its IT infrastructure and requiring significant
resources to manage.

Mecklenburg selected EMC over NetApp and Dell (Compellent) to
transform its infrastructure with the help of EMC Velocity Solution Provider, Varrow, Inc. It implemented
VNX, the FAST Suite, CTA and Avamar. Mecklenburg’s infrastructure supports
Oracle, PeopleSoft, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, VMware and internally
developed applications for social services, tax administration, and the
Sheriff’s department, among others, so it was critical that the solutions they
chose be scalable, reliable and cost-effective.

Mecklenburg is able to move data based on activity
level. Within the array, FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual
Pools) moves data across a storage pool of flash based on customer-defined
policies, while CTA does the same from the VNX to archive storage, freeing up primary storage for data growth. Together these technologies enable
Mecklenburg to lower CapEx and OpEx while simultaneously improving performance.

Carolyn Shumate, technical analyst II, Mecklenburg County Government,
said: "When it came to consolidating
our block and file data, we looked at NetApp very carefully and also considered
Dell Compellent. Ultimately, we chose EMC VNX unified storage because the
others just couldn’t compete with EMC on features, capabilities and cost. Since
deploying EMC unified storage, we’ve been able to consolidate as many as 20
file servers and enjoy the performance, management and cost benefits of automated
tiering.

"At the rate we were
growing, we would have filled up our backup system two times over had we not
deployed EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance. By archiving 90 days’ worth of inactive
data, EMC’s Cloud Tiering Appliance reduced the volume of data from backup substantially.
For example, a 1.4 TB file share was reduced to about 500 GB of relevant data.

"EMC’s Cloud Tiering Appliance
has allowed us to reclaim 7 TB of primary storage and avoid adding more space
for CIFS file shares. Because backup volumes are now under control, we’ve also
postponed purchasing additional backup disk, saving $60,000 in capital
expenditures.

"Since reducing our tape
backups with Avamar and integrating Cloud Tiering Appliance to automate
archiving, we’ve shrunk our full backup window nearly 90%-from 72 hours to just
eight. And we now complete full backups every day with no need for differential
backups as before.

"The deduplication
technology in Avamar has been awesome because it’s lowered our retention cost.
Restoring is also a lot faster, without the hassle of shuffling out tapes. In
one case we restored 1.5 GB of data in less than five minutes. With tape, that
easily could have taken two hours. And the reliability is second to none. We
tell people, if you want a product that works 100%, then buy Avamar; if you
want a product that only works half way, then buy something else.

"One of the biggest areas
EMC adds value is their personalized customer service. They provide one central
line of support, unlike other vendors we’ve had in the past who bounced us
around. We like that EMC is always responsive to our needs."