Apptix Builds Resilient Hosted Services Environment With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Apptix has deployed EMC CLARiiON CX-4 networked storage systems as the backbone of its hosted Microsoft Exchange email and Microsoft SharePoint collaboration services for small and medium-sized businesses.

"We have more than 20,000 customers that depend on the reliability, simplicity and value of our integrated communication solutions," said John Kersse, Apptix’s Chief Technology Officer. "Customers expect their Microsoft Exchange messaging service to be as readily accessible – anytime, anywhere. As a result, we needed to implement an information infrastructure that provides superior uptime and scalability to meet our customers’ growing needs."

Apptix manages one of the largest independent hosted Microsoft Exchange services networks with 200,000 end-users and provides its customers with flexible, easy-to-use, business-class messaging solutions with large mailboxes up to 5GB in size, as well as collaboration and group scheduling. Managing system availability and information growth is a primary requirement for any hosted-service provider, and a core requirement for a successful Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging deployment. Apptix chose EMC as its infrastructure partner for its deep expertise in Microsoft Exchange.

EMC offers a large portfolio of Microsoft application solutions, including a deep history around information management and storage solutions for Microsoft Exchange. EMC solutions augment and complement the easy-to-use features of Microsoft Exchange, while providing the efficient, consolidated, high-performance Storage Area Network (SAN) environment customers’ desire.

As Microsoft Exchange experts, Apptix considered multiple new storage deployment options, but after comparing total cost of ownership, performance, manageability and future growth needs, Apptix chose to deploy a combination of CLARiiON storage with Exchange Server replication functionality to provide its customers with highly available, high performance enterprise-class Exchange email.

"In the planning stages, we had briefly considered a move to DAS," said Kersse. "By partnering with EMC, we now have a more reliable and cost effective infrastructure and the horizontal scalability we need to continue to grow our business and deliver the service levels our customers demand. And, EMC’s local experts ensured the change was seamless to our end users."