Internet Database Provider Ovid Technologies Standardizes on EMC Storage

EMC Corporation announced that Ovid Technologies, Inc., part of the Wolters Kluwer group of companies and a provider of electronic information to the scientific, technical and medical markets, is standardizing on its enterprise storage as its infrastructure for managing rapid Internet business expansion.

Ovid is basing its new infrastructure on the EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage platform and several EMC software solutions – including TimeFinder, PowerPath and InfoMover.

Roger Wilcox, Ovid’s VP of operations, said: “In the last year, we’ve seen our online system usage quadruple and we’re expecting that upward trend to continue in the months and years ahead. With EMC Enterprise Storage as our core information infrastructure, we can add storage capacity on the fly and easily absorb any changes we may make to our CPU platform, applications or databases. This level of open flexibility and the unique characteristics of EMC software are strategic to bringing new products online at Internet speed and delivering more frequent updates to our customer-accessed databases.“

“Because our storage is handled more efficiently on EMC, we’re buying back significant dollars and man hours that would otherwise be spent on the network, servers, and storage administration,” he continued. “We can allocate these resources to product development and other areas that directly improve our customers’ experience and ultimately speed up our revenue flow.“

Ovid, headquartered in NYC, has turned to TimeFinder and PowerPath software to address customers’ increasing need for unfettered, 24-hour-a-day access to its databases. Using TimeFinder, Ovid can create exact mirrored copies of its online systems for backup, product development and testing. PowerPath’s load balancing capability allows Ovid to accommodate a high number of users accessing the same data simultaneously.

Larry Hanks, Ovid’s director of technology operations, said: “Using TimeFinder to create mirrored copies of our systems while they are in production shrinks our daily backup window and enhances the speed by which users access our databases. EMC’s PowerPath software efficiently re-routes network traffic across alternative paths, enabling us to distribute data to our users as quickly as possible.“

According to him, Ovid will implement InfoMover software to migrate data from existing Box Hill disk arrays to the EMC Symmetrix system: “Because the data transfer can be conducted off the network, it will reduce our spending on the network, improve reliability, improve performance, and conserve CPU resources.“

Approximately 3.5TB of storage resides on Ovid’s EMC Symmetrix system, which supports Sun Solaris servers. Ovid’s extensive journal collections and other information is stored on the system, which also serves as a staging area for new data entering Ovid’s databases.

David Donatelli, EMC’s VP, new business development, said: “A flexible and adaptive information infrastructure is critical to satisfying unexpected customer demand and delivering new products and services before the competition. Ovid and numerous other fast-moving Internet firms are achieving success and superior customer service by implementing EMC Enterprise Storage to gain control over the heart of their business – information.“