Farm Credit Mid-America Chooses EMC Replacing Xiotech

EMC
Corporation announced that Farm Credit Mid-America, an agricultural
cooperative serving more than 95,000 farmers, agribusinesses and rural
residents, selected EMC VNX unified storage over NetApp and Dell storage for its performance, scalability and manageability.

Farm Credit also chose EMC RecoverPoint for DR. By transforming its business
operations with EMC technologies, it is enabling its loan
specialists to deliver responsive customer service, generate more revenue and
perform their jobs with increased efficiency.

Customer
Benefits:

• 
  Performance: Farm Credit Mid-America
  reported performance improvements of up to 79% for applications, such as SharePoint
  and SQL Server.
• Cost Savings: By leveraging a FLASH
  1st strategy on VNX, Farm Credit is handling 45% of its I/O requirements on
  only 1% of its total capacity, reducing CAPEX expenditures for disk drives and
  decreasing the consumption of power and cooling resources, lowering OPEX.
• Data Protection: It attributes recovery timeframes shrinking from 12 hours to
  nearly zero to its DR infrastructure
  Efficiency: With easy
  management and automation, VNX has enabled Farm Credit to reduce time spent on
  storage administration tasks by one FTE, allowing it to reallocate resources to
  other projects.

Customer
Challenges and Solution:
Farm Credit previously depended on an aging Xiotech
storage infrastructure that lacked the performance and scalability to meet
increasing data growth. The storage infrastructure also was time-consuming and
costly to manage. Data protection was another challenge since Farm Credit’s
tape-based backup and remote data replication solutions were often unreliable.

To resolve these issues, Farm Credit chose VNX unified storage after considering EMC, NetApp and Dell storage
solutions. It leverages a FLASH 1st automated tiering strategy using
the EMC FAST Suite for optimized performance and efficiency. Using
vSphere, the company has virtualized 90% of its applications, including SharePoint,
SQL Server, Exchange and eDocument systems. In addition, Farm Credit replaced
Xiotech TimeScale with EMC RecoverPoint for continuous data replication between
its primary and DR data centers.

Fred Gordon, systems engineer, Farm Credit
Mid-America, said: "We looked at
NetApp, but they tried to sell us solutions with bundled software that we were
never going to use. Plus, NetApp could not meet our block storage needs like
EMC could. With the VNX, we consolidated our block and file storage onto one
platform, which makes it very easy to scale and manage. Plus, we’re achieving
performance improvements of up to 79%. The VNX just blew NetApp right out of
the water.

"VNX’s
FLASH 1st strategy has really upped the performance of our critical
applications. Our CIO was so impressed he wanted to move our SharePoint CRM
cluster to VNX to eliminate I/O bottlenecks. After migrating SharePoint to VNX,
performance shot up by 35%.

"VNX
and FLASH 1st have generated some significant savings. For example, Flash
drives make up less than 1% of our total capacity, but they handle 45% of our
IOPS requirements. So not only do we purchase fewer drives, which lowers our
CAPEX, but Flash drives consume less power and cooling, which help to reduce
our OPEX.

"With
better performance and response times enabled by VNX, loan specialists in the
field are able to access online tools quickly and write more business. Our
customers receive better service and we’re gaining an important competitive
advantage.

"When
we relied on our Xiotech storage, we couldn’t monitor I/Os, but now we can see
precisely what’s going on in the VNX. If we need to increase storage capacity,
we can view the LUN, and connect and provision it in minutes. Adding a new
machine is exponentially easier than with Xiotech. Due to VNX’s easy management
and automation, we’ve saved time spent by one FTE and have reallocated that
resource to other projects. We just set the VNX and forget it.

"Remote
data replication with RecoverPoint is streamlined and efficient. It just works.
If there’s a network drop, RecoverPoint will cache what’s been transferred so
we don’t have to start over when the connection is re-established. And because
it’s integrated with VNX’s administrative interface, we can manage it as part
of the simplified, one-window management system.

"Downtime risk to our business has been
dramatically reduced thanks to RecoverPoint. With our old systems, we had a
24-hour RPO and a 12-hour RTO. Now, our RPO is one minute and our RTO is nearly
zero."