Belgian Benefits Firm Partena Transforms IT Infrastructure With EMC

EMC
Corporation announced that Partena, a Brussels-based social services
organization that provides 1.2 million individuals and 60,000 companies with
payroll and human resource management, employment insurance, benefits
management and other services, has transformed its IT infrastructure with EMC
VNX unified storage and EMC VPLEX virtual storage to address exponential data
growth.

Partena credits EMC with cost savings and eliminating
infrastructure downtime.

Customer
Benefits:

• Application Availability:
  By running applications simultaneously across two active-active data centers
  with  VPLEX, Partena has eliminated downtime – a reduction of three hours
  per month to zero.
• Cost Savings: It has reduced
  its operational and capital expenditures by 60% through virtualization,
  providing more resources for projects that drive business growth and increase
  customer satisfaction.
• Application Deployment:
  Partena is able to roll out new applications in only a few days versus the one
  month it typically took before – a 90% reduction in deployment time.
• Streamlined Administration: Tight
  integration between VNX and VMware has reduced administration time by 50%,
  freeing IT staff to focus on more critical projects.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Partena’s storage infrastructure was expanding while government
regulations and customer SLAs that specified lengthy
data retention periods and high data availability requirements were putting
added pressures on the infrastructure. To help improve availability, enable
faster deployment and reduce expenses, Partena selected VNX and VPLEX.

Since implementing these technologies, Partena has achieved improvements in infrastructure scalability, efficiency and application
availability. The company has also virtualized 90% of its server infrastructure
using vSphere. All of Partena’s applications and databases, including SQL Servers and Oracle databases, reside on VNX unified storage.
To enable DR, Partena uses VPLEX virtual storage to run its applications across
two data centers several hundred meters apart. Partena also leverages VMware
View for desktop virtualization.

Philippe Picalausa, IT manager, Partena,
said: "We operate under strict SLAs and
government regulations that require us to generate payroll and other employee
services within specified time periods. With EMC VPLEX, we’re able to run all
our applications in an active-active mode across two separate data centers. If
a server fails, the application continues to run at the alternate site without
any disruption to our users and customers.

"Our EMC infrastructure is
absolutely critical to the smooth and reliable operation of our business. In
fact, since we’ve been using EMC storage, we haven’t had any storage-related
downtime. Now we’ve added VPLEX, enabling us to increase security and
protection by eliminating infrastructure downtime.

"The
tight integration between our VMware and VNX environments has reduced
administration time by 50%, which in turn has freed our IT staff to focus on
more critical projects. Rapid virtualization combined with VNX’s excellent performance
and simplified management has reduced our IT operational and capital
expenditures by 60%.

"Our business is much more agile now
that we’ve virtualized with VMware and EMC. We can deploy new applications in a
few days versus the month it took us before. That’s a 90% reduction in time.
It’s very easy to create proofs of concepts, test scenarios and other
environments to develop new services and features that help expand the business
and improve customer satisfaction.

"When we initially virtualized
desktops at the branch level, we discovered how much easier it is to manage
virtual desktops compared to physical PCs and laptops. For example, we can
distribute upgrades faster with just a few clicks. And users can boot up their
virtual desktops more quickly."