Cancer Research UK Selects EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Cancer Research UK (CRUK),
a charity dedicated to beating cancer through
research, has transformed its IT infrastructure and deployed its private cloud
with EMC technologies and VMware virtualisation and cloud infrastructure
technologies.

Cancer Research UK’s IT staff are now able to provide its 3,500 employees with
faster, more reliable access to the supporter data, donor databases and applications on which fundraising and marketing activities
depend.

CRUK is using EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, EMC NetWorker
unified backup and recovery software and EMC VNX unified storage, as well as vSphere for its virtualised applications, including Siebel, Oracle,
Microsoft SQL and Citrix XenDesktop for over 1,200 virtual desktops.

Customer Benefits:

• Performance: Since moving to a FLASH 1st strategy with VNX,
  CRUK’s storage performance has improved by 30% enabling its employees to
  complete simple tasks like opening emails instantly, and improve virtual
  desktop boot storm performance.
• Efficiency: CRUK has
  improved storage utilisation by 30%, making it possible for the charity to
  scale to accommodate its 30% yearly data growth while sustaining performance and staying within budget.
• Backup and DR Capabilities:
  CRUK has substantially reduced the cost of and time spent on data backup and DR
  with its highly automated Data Domain and NetWorker solution.
• ROI: CRUK expects
  its EMC backup and recovery solution to pay for itself in 18 months.

Customer Challenges and Solutions:
Cancer Research UK’s legacy storage environment was no longer providing
adequate capacity and system performance, putting unnecessary pressure on the
charity’s IT staff and resources. CRUK employees experienced delays in their
requests, ranging from simply accessing emails to complex database queries used
by marketing and event managers to drive fund raising. These delays and
processes were not allowing the organisation to maximize its resources and help
staff deliver key activities including raising funds for world-class research
into all aspects of cancer, providing information, and influencing public
policy.

As part of its IT transformation, CRUK turned to partner CAE to recommend
technologies that would better support the charity’s IT operations by providing
faster, more reliable access to data and applications for its
3,500 employees. CRUK selected EMC for both its storage and backup and recovery
needs.

More Cost-Effective Backup and Recovery
CRUK selected an integrated EMC backup and recovery solution featuring Data Domain and NetWorker to protect approximately 200TB of block and file data, including 480 Windows and 300 Linux virtual machines. Working with CAE, CRUK deployed the EMC solutions at CRUK’s two co-location data centres. The primary data centre stores vital operating data, runs applications, and supports 1,200 thin client terminals operated by the CRUK staff. The secondary data centre supports test and development of data and applications. Accurate and reliable local backups protect both sites and backups are replicated between data domain systems for DR. Data Domain and NetWorker have enabled CRUK to reduce the cost of and time spent on data backup. The charity has simplified backup and recovery management with NetWorker while reducing its daily backup and recovery timing with Data Domain. CRUK expects its EMC backup solution to pay for itself within 18 months.

Higher Performing Storage
CRUK selected VNX unified storage running EMC’s FAST Suite and Total Protection Pack to replace its legacy storage solution. It has implemented a FLASH 1st strategy in its unified storage environment, using the FAST Suite and enterprise Flash drives to achieve a 30% performance improvement. CRUK automatically tiers ‘hot’ or active data to Flash, while tiering less active data onto cost-effective, high capacity drives. CRUK plans to implement EMC VFCache, a server flash cache solution, to further boost system performance and provide faster access to its CRM solutions on Oracle for its marketing department. CRUK’s choice of EMC unified storage with the total protection pack has also helped provide better protection for the organization’s fundraising data using EMC RecoverPoint.

Michael Briggs, head of infrastructure, Cancer Research UK, said: "As an IT department, our job is to provide
our internal ‘customers’ with the reliable and efficient systems they need to
work towards delivering Cancer Research UK’s vision to bring forward the day
when all cancers are cured, but we were facing significant performance issues.
Our previous IT infrastructure didn’t have the necessary storage processing
power or flexibility to handle our growing data demands and the resulting
delays that our users were experiencing were something we just couldn’t afford.
With CAE’s help, we decided to transform our IT infrastructure using EMC
technologies and began seeing the benefits straight away; both in terms of an
immediate performance improvement and a reduction in backup time and cost."

On More Cost-effective Backup and
Recovery:
"Our staff has been delighted by
the ease-of-use and scalability of Data Domain and NetWorker. The cost of our
EMC backup solution means that we will break even within 18 months, compared
with the cost of the older managed service. In addition, we can back up all
mission-critical applications and data, as well as testing and development
data, with a very small footprint. Deciding on the EMC backup solution was a
no-brainer.

"If data and applications are
corrupted or unavailable, and if backups are not accurate, our IT capabilities
could be compromised. We are not the scientists doing the research, however
everything we do is to ensure funding gets to those scientists so they can
carry out their life-saving research. We take that very seriously and work to
make our systems as reliable as possible to ensure we deliver the best possible
systems for the organisation. Our EMC-powered infrastructure with EMC Data
Domain, and NetWorker and VNX unified storage make that possible."

On Higher Performing Storage:

"Our EMC VNX with FAST Suite
implementation began to pay for itself immediately thanks to faster performance
and higher data availability. We can get more processing power spread out over
a smaller number of disks, cost-effectively.

"We’ll be using VNX and VFCache for
our CRM solutions to provide high levels of data availability to our marketing
teams.

"We
will transfer Oracle load caching and re-do logs to Dedicated Flash drives on
the VNX. We plan to deploy VFCache in native mode with application
acceleration. As a Flash RAM, we’ll plug this high IOPS card into a server, and
it will act like a high performance expansion card. Working with FAST, it will
hold hot traffic for high availability, yielding near-zero latency. We have
just pressed the button on VFCache, and even in early testing we are seeing
significant performance improvements."