Nashville Electric Service Switches to EMC VNX

EMC
Corporation announced that Nashville Electric Service
(NES), one of the nation’s 12 largest public electric utilities and an energy
distributor to 360,000 customers in Tennessee, selected EMC’s VNX unified
storage over NetApp and Hitachi. NES selected EMC VNX to improve
the performance of its 90% virtualized information
infrastructure- replacing 100 terabytes of NetApp storage.

Customer Benefits:

• Powerful and
  scalable storage capacity- NES has virtually unlimited capacity to handle
  increasing storage demand for their GIS mapping applications and upcoming smart
  grid infrastructure
• Increased
  efficiency-backups that used to take four hours now take just one
• Increased
  performance-NES saw improved performance when they moved their test and
  development environments to the VNX solution and the same or better
  improvements after migrating their production systems to the VNX solution
• Ease of
  installation and migration

"With 20-percent annual storage growth over several
years, we were constantly running out of capacity using NetApp storage and our
users were complaining about slow system response. We evaluated EMC unified
storage, NetApp and Hitachi
based on their technical capabilities, system performance, ease of
expandability and manageability, cost and service agreements," said Vic
Hatridge, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at NES. "EMC was
the clear winner across the board. Once we moved our test and development
environments to the VNX, we were so pleased with the improved performance that
we escalated our production moves and are now seeing 65 % to 80 % faster
production system backups and equal improvements to our end-users response
times."

"We add about 10 terabytes of data every twelve months.
Before we were worried about having to put a lot of new projects on hold due to
overwhelming storage demand," added Ricky Davis, Infrastructure Manager
with CIBER, Inc. at NES. "Now, with the VNX, those worries are gone and
we’ll be able to scale our storage capacity very easily as new applications and
requirements are needed."

"When it comes to ease of implementation, VNX exceeded
our expectations. It took just two days to migrate our test and development
environment, which is pretty remarkable," said Hatridge. "We moved
NES’s VMware VDMK files from NetApp over to EMC while the test and development
applications were live without issue."

"We had our production environment scheduled to be
moved over a three month period; however, since the migration of our test and
development was so successful we altered our migrations and to date we are 90
percent complete with the entire migration. Our plans are to complete the move
to the EMC VNX by the end of June," said Davis.

"Our users have seen some pretty remarkable
improvements. We used to receive daily calls from key users reporting
performance issues and system failures with many of our primary applications
and since migrating their data and servers to the VNX, they are now able to get
their jobs done and without incident. It’s a real pleasure seeing them happy.
All of the systems that we’ve migrated to this VNX solution have seen
incredible performance gains and a level of stability that we’ve not seen in
some time now due to issues with our previous NetApp solution," Davis
said.

NES’s new 370-terabyte EMC unified storage infrastructure is
comprised of two EMC VNX systems, each configured with 600-gigabyte SAS drives
and 2-terabyte nearline SAS (NL SAS) drives. One VNX is located at the primary
data center and a second VNX is at NES’s disaster recovery site approximately
20 miles away. NES runs its production applications on the SAS drives,
including its outage management system, GIS, Oracle-based enterprise resource
planning, PeopleSoft human resources, Microsoft SQL Server-based call
management, Microsoft Exchange email and Microsoft SharePoint collaboration
solution. The NL SAS drives will store archived data including email, Microsoft
Word documents and other infrequently accessed information.

Approximately 90-percent of the production environment is
virtualized using VMware vSphere, with 200 virtual servers running on 16 VMware
physical servers. NES uses EMC
Unisphere, which provides an interface to provision,
monitor and manage storage for the utility’s virtualized and physical servers.
For disaster recovery, the EMC RecoverPoint solution will provide continuous
remote replication (CRR) between the two VNX systems in separate data centers
located 20 miles apart.