Crossflight Selects VNX Unified Storage

Crossflight
Ltd.
has chosen EMC
Corporation
over Hitachi, IBM and HP to transform its IT infrastructure, drive
its ongoing virtualization program and to support customer service.

With 90% of
Crossflight’s customer orders conducted through its website, it
selected EMC
VNX
unified
storage
to help manage its applications, such as Pervasive SQL; minimize
downtime and boost its storage performance and availability. The
company is also using vSphere for its 85% VMware virtualized
infrastructure.

Customer
Benefits:

• Performance:
  Crossflight has increased performance by 20% since implementing VNX.

• Data
  Availability:
  With VNX and vSphere, the company is able to manage its
  infrastructure and perform system maintenance without any service
  interruption to its online transaction services.

• Cost
  Savings: It has reduced power and cooling demands by 50% with VNX and
  vSphere, while avoiding downtime for maintenance that can lead to
  £60,000 in missed revenue per day.

• Streamlined
  Administration: Integration
  between VNX and VMware has simplified system management, reducing
  administration time and cost and enabling the IT staff to focus on
  more critical projects.

Customer
Challenges and Solutions:
Crossflight’s IT
infrastructure is essential to its operations and ability to process
customer orders, 90% of which are conducted online. However, the
legacy storage infrastructure was no longer meeting its information
storage demands and lacked the integration with VMware that it
required. To support its customer service and ongoing virtualization
program, it needed a storage solution that could provide increased
system performance, data availability and scalability.

After evaluating several solutions from EMC, Hitachi, IBM and HP, Crossflight selected VNX with VMware vSphere for its performance, scalability and tight integration with VMware. With its EMC and VMware technologies, the company has improved performance by 20%, increased data availability and achieved significant cost savings. Crossflight is now able to efficiently and simply manage its infrastructure and perform system maintenance without any service interruption to its vital online transaction services or other mission-critical applications. By provisioning virtual machines, Crossflight can ensure that its customers and partners always have rapid and uninterrupted access to order details, transactions and shipment histories.

Integration between VNX and VMware also helps Crossflight streamline administration and eliminate costly downtime for maintenance that can lead to £60,000 in missed revenue per day. Additionally, Crossflight has been able to reduce power and cooling demands by 50% with VNX, resulting in resulting in annual cost savings.

Guy Dawson, IT Manager, Crossflight, said: "Due to the nature of our business, data availability and performance is vital to our operation. If our systems go down, our operations can completely stop and we can lose up to £60,000 per day. Thanks to more powerful processors in the VNX, performance has increased by 20% and the TCO is lower. With our IT infrastructure upgraded, we can ensure we provide the highest quality level of service to our customers."

"Customer support was another key reason we selected EMC. We find the EMC support staff is extremely knowledgeable and has the virtualization expertise we require."