RFID Zebra Technologies Using EMC VMAX

EMC Corporation announced that Zebra Technologies Corporation, offering technologies that extend real-time visibility into business operations, selected EMC VMAX 10K enterprise storage to transform to its newly-implemented Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructure.

The combination of Oracle ERP infrastructure and EMC VMAX 10K, provides Zebra Technologies with a boost in performance, reliability and scalability to its order processing applications. Now, with Oracle accessed by approximately 9,000 total Zebra employees and its partner companies, Zebra can ensure that orders can be booked and with no impact to its business as transaction loads increase.

Customer Benefits:

• Performance: VMAX 10K improves Oracle performance by 30%, accelerating Zebra's order and shipment processing.
• Reliability: The company has achieved 100% storage uptime while transaction volumes increase.
• Costs: By automatically placing 'hot' and 'cold' information on the best disk drives for the job - whether fjash drives, or low cost SATA drives - EMC FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) helps Zebra maximize performance and efficiency while lowering costs.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

The provider of enabling technologies undertook a major IT transformation, based on the implementation of a new Oracle ERP infrastructure. The transformation included hundreds of business process changes and a massive data migration. Zebra wanted to ensure that day-to-day operations would not be disrupted.

After evaluating various storage solutions, Zebra determined that EMC's VMAX 10K would meet the performance, scalability and reliability demands of its new Oracle ERP infrastructure during - and after - the migration.

Zebra is now leveraging FAST VP on its VMAX 10K to optimize flash drive utilization. Not only has VMAX 10K ensured Zebra of a transition to the Oracle infrastructure with 100% uptime, but the solution has driven cost savings as a result of improved flash drive utilization and simplified administration.

With EMC Global Services handling the VMAX 10K implementation, Zebra relies on VMAX 10K for its global footprint of Oracle applications, including Agile Product Lifecycle Management, Siebel Customer Relationship Management, Oracle eBusiness Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence, Fusion Middleware, Hyperion Planning and Oracle Identity Manager.

Don O'Shea, CIO, Zebra Technologies, said: "We had a critical timeline to support our business expansion. We went live with Oracle and VMAX 10K without missing a beat, allowing us to maintain the high level of service our customers have come to expect.

"EMC Global Services worked hand-in-hand with us to deploy an entirely new information infrastructure as we migrated our critical applications to Oracle. EMC - and its technologies - executed flawlessly throughout the process.

"The VMAX 10K is optimized for mission-critical applications and delivers a superior solution that mitigated our risks as we migrated to Oracle. EMC also brought impressive Oracle technical expertise to the table, working with us at a very detailed level to optimize the environment. EMC's strong expertise with Oracle environments was definitely an asset to our transformation."

Jeffrey Hand, IT director, Zebra Technologies, said: "The VMAX 10K's ability to process orders and ship products all on a single global instance of Oracle with 100% uptime and excellent performance is commendable. Being able to economically scale to support our growing workloads with confidence was integral to our project.

"FAST VP provides a significant cost savings by automatically promoting the heaviest-use applications to high-speed drives and demoting less active applications to lower-cost drives. Even as we take on greater transaction loads, VMAX 10K has improved performance by 30%.

"Typical ERP implementations can be very costly and disruptive. VMAX 10K proved to be an essential part of our successful Oracle implementation."