Pharmaceutical Purdue Pharma Selecting EMC

EMC Corporation, Purdue Pharma L.P., a privately-held pharmaceutical company engaged in research, development, production, and marketing of prescription and over-the-counter medicines and healthcare products, has transformed its IT infrastructure with EMC, VMware and VCE technologies.

Purdue Pharma is leveraging these technologies to enable and accelerate virtualization and IT consolidation and achieved delivery of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) while enabling DR.

Customer Benefits:

• Reduced Infrastructure and Energy Costs: IT transformation has reduced Purdue’s data center footprint by 70% with projected infrastructure savings of $9 million and energy cost savings of $2.5 million over five years.
• Rapid DR: It has increased resiliency to recover from natural disasters, such as tornadoes that wipe out power and communications, in just hours instead of days with EMC RecoverPoint CDP.
• Improved Backup and Recovery: EMC Avamar helps keep drug data securely protected, yet easily retrievable.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
With no action, Purdue Pharma would soon have faced the risks of running out of power capacity and data center space, DR software losing support from the vendor, and a new cost and configuration complexities. Its aging infrastructure had difficulty keeping up with the massive volumes of new data. To help the business, IT needed to also speed delivery of specialized CRM)services and enable iPad support for an increasingly mobile and connected sales force.

To help Purdue Pharma increase its ability to deliver new services, the company selected Avamar deduplication backup software, RecoverPoint continuous data protection while leveraging support capabilities from EMC Global Services as well as VCE Vblock Systems for converged infrastructure and vSphere. The new IT infrastructure supports its applications including Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle, SAP and CRM.

Steve Rayda, CTO, Purdue Pharma, said: “Faster time to market is critical as Purdue enters new areas where our exact IT requirements are not predictable. With the agility of an IT infrastructure built on EMC, VCE and VMware technologies, we can dynamically allocate infrastructure resources as needed. It has helped us to deliver services quickly and efficiently. Not only are we supporting the company’s mission, but we’re helping to do so more efficiently.

“Because of dramatic server and storage consolidation, we’ve been able to shrink our data center footprint significantly and decrease our capital IT budget by 20-30%. We’re expecting to realize multi-million dollar cost savings and avoidance of added expenses over five years. These savings give us room to grow and develop IT services that support the company’s efforts.

“With an ITaaS model, our business users are no longer involved with backend details of the infrastructure. Once the project team establishes the business requirements, their IT counterparts can quickly provision appropriate storage and data protection.

“With EMC’s backup and recovery solutions, we can keep our data well protected, yet easily retrievable. De-duplication rates of up to 98% have reduced our backups from hours to minutes. We’ve also reduced backup tapes by nearly 90% per month, which provides added cost and time savings.

“The resilience of our private cloud proved invaluable when one of our sites got hit with 60+ tornadoes within a 12 hour period. While our local competitors were down for days, we successfully rerouted traffic and Monday morning was business as usual at Purdue, with all connections safely switched over and no data loss or connectivity interruption.“