AutomationDirect Switched From IBM to EMC Storage Infrastructure

EMC
Corporation announced that AutomationDirect.com,
Inc. an online store of industrial controls products, has
standardized on VMAX 10K with FAST VP and other EMC software.

The company is leveraging these EMC
technologies to drive business expansion and reduce costs while
rolling out initiatives, including DR, virtualized desktop computing
and big data analytics.

Customer Benefits:

• Efficiency – By consolidating 50
  storage devices onto VMAX 10K, the company has decreased its data
  center footprint by 50% while increasing storage utilization by 160%.

• Cost Savings – With FAST VP, it
  has reduced the time spent managing storage to almost zero while
  improving performance to support business growth.

• Administration – The
  IT staff have reduced time spent on storage provisioning by 5x,
  freeing up resources.

• Availability – Periods of
  downtime lasting an hour or more have disappeared since the company
  standardized on VMAX.

• Business Growth – VMAX 10K has
  enabled AutomationDirect.com to roll out its big data analytics
  strategy to streamline the product launch process from weeks to just
  days.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

AutomationDirect.com was experiencing
business growth. Its decentralized IBM storage infrastructure had
become inefficient and lacked performance and reliability.

After reviewing solutions from EMC,
Hitachi, IBM, NetApp and 3Par, it selected VMAX 10K storage and
FAST VP storage tiering software to optimize performance and
efficiency while leveraging the expertise of EMC Global Services. The
company is also implementing EMC RecoverPoint data protection and
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager solutions to enable DR with
replication of its storage and VMs to a remote VMAX 10K.

Approximately 80% of the server
infrastructure is virtualized using VMware vSphere. EMC VMAX 10K
stores 200 VMware VMs running Exchange, SQL Server,
DB2, Epicor Prophet 21 enterprise resource planning, and PathGuide
Latitude warehouse management system, among other applications
including its big data Analytics application.

Trace Nabors, systems administrator, AutomationDirect.com, said: "Since leveraging FAST VP to
automatically tier data, we are spending much less time and money on
storage. We are achieving the performance we need without distributed
storage systems sitting in the data center taking up unnecessary and
precious space.

"With the majority of our
business coming from our web site, system availability is critical to
our revenue flow. Since implementing VMAX 10K, the availability of
our IT infrastructure has been phenomenal. We haven’t experienced any
of the availability issues we used to have with our previous
solution.

"We now have the performance
and scalability to roll out big data analytics. With a new master
data management system, we now have better control over our
information and streamlined the product launch process from weeks to
days. It provides us a lot more flexibility as far as what we sell,
how quickly we can sell it, and where we sell it. The VMAX 10K has
opened up a lot of opportunities to grow our business.

"We are much more confident
virtualizing our bigger applications, like the ERP and warehouse
management, on the VMAX 10K platform because of EMC’s tight
integration with VMware. The VMAX 10K provides us with the
consistently, high performance and uptime our mission-critical
applications demand.

"The integration between VMware
and VMAX 10K makes it easy to scale the infrastructure to support our
business growth. With our IBM arrays, I always worried about space
and constantly checking the controllers. Instead of working at least
five hours a week on storage administration, I spend zero time with
the VMAX 10K."