Law Firm Blank Rome Implements EMC VNX

EMC Corporation announced that Blank Rome LLP, an American law firm,
has implemented EMC Corp.‘s VNX unified storage, Avamar, RecoverPoint and
VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies to transform its
global IT infrastructure to enable more efficient growth, improved agility and
increased performance.

Blank Rome transformed its IT infrastructure, moving to
a virtual environment to create a private cloud.

As part of its transformation, Blank Rome has increased the
performance and availability of its applications including Exchange, SQL and SharePoint.

According to an annual global end user
survey by IDC, more customers choose EMC storage than any other vendor’s for
their Microsoft environments and other applications.

Customer Benefits:

• Cost Savings: Blank
  Rome has saved millions of dollars in hardware and maintenance expenditures and
  reduced energy costs 30% as a result of massive storage consolidation and
  server virtualization.
• Business Agility: With VNX unified storage, Blank Rome has reduced its storage footprint by
  60% and increased storage capacity by 40%, supporting the firm’s ongoing
  business expansion.
• Performance: It has increased the performance of the firm’s
  Microsoft SQL Server applications while managing an increase in
  transactions.
• Streamlined
  Administration: It is able to develop business-critical applications
  and react to demands from the business, provisioning new systems faster
  to accommodate growth, rather than manage equipment.
• DR: With Avamar and RecoverPoint, it has achieved a 99%
  deduplication rate and 85% reduction in application recovery time, allowing it
  to focus on further IT transformation.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
For the past 5+ years, Blank Rome has been expanding its operations, which led to increased
storage, server and protection requirements for its applications such as Exchange, email archiving and litigation
support. In addition, the firm’s main data center was running out of floor
space and data backup windows were overlapping with production hours.

To transform its infrastructure, it standardized on EMC SANs, and most
recently, VNX unified storage as the foundation of its
private cloud. In addition, the firm has virtualized nearly 100% of its IT infrastructure
with VMware vSphere  and supports nearly
400 VMs across the globe. Blank Rome’s applications, including Exchange 2010, SQL Server and SharePoint,
spans the firm’s primary data center in Philadelphia, and remote office or
DR sites in Pittsburgh, New York City, Washington, D.C., Los
Angeles, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Blank Rome depends on RecoverPoint  for continuous replication and point in time
recovery of its VNX environment to its DR site 300 miles away in
Pittsburgh. It uses Avamar deduplication backup software and system
to protect its virtualized infrastructure across the US and Asia with
replication of Avamar backups to grids located in LA and off site at a SunGard
facility in Philadelphia.

Larry Liss, CTO, Blank Rome, said: "The streamlined provisioning, enabled by VNX and VMware, is a
real game changer because we can grow quickly and efficiently, without
disruption. It’s also critical to delivering the high value and quality service
that are hallmarks of our firm.

"By transforming our infrastructure with VNX, VMware, Avamar
and RecoverPoint, we’ve reduced our administrative costs and our engineers have
shifted to developing more mission-critical business applications rather than
managing equipment. In fact, even with the firm’s growth, our entire
virtualized, storage and DR environments have been implemented
and maintained in-house by a single staff member."

Frank Gurfolino, chief network architect, Blank Rome, said: "EMC makes it easy and affordable for just one person to manage
a state-of-the-art data center. EMC VNX is so simple to use that even with just
one person managing the firm’s virtual infrastructure, we can provide our
clients with the best possible service while continuing to innovate. Without
EMC’s affordability and simplicity, we wouldn’t have been able to transform and
create a powerful and flexible private cloud that enables us to react quickly to
the demands of the business.

"With virtualization and consolidation, we’ve avoided the need
to buy hundreds of servers. The VNX reduced our storage footprint by about 60%,
while providing 40% more capacity. By reducing our hardware, we’ve lowered our
power and cooling consumption significantly. It adds up to millions of dollars
in savings, enabling us to increase the value of our technology
investments.

"With everything we’ve put on Avamar, we have a deduplication
rate of over 99%, so our backups take so much less time than before. We used to
start backing up to tape in the evening and run into the next day with daily
backups. Our month-end runs would take days. They now complete in a matter of
hours, well within our backup window. It’s been truly amazing.

"EMC’s umbrella of technologies work really well together and
set the foundation for building our private cloud. There’s real peace of mind
knowing that the engineers developing our storage, backup, and virtualization
solutions all collaborate. The products are rock-solid, and we see no reason to
look elsewhere as we continue to evolve our cloud strategy."