Heritage Auctions Repplace Xiotech by EMC Symmetrix VMAXe

EMC
Corporation announced that Heritage Auctions, the
largest collectibles auctioneer and third largest auction house in the world,
has selected the new Symmetrix VMAXe storage system for its
mission-critical SQL Server-based website and auction applications and to
accelerate its move to a 98% virtualized infrastructure. 

Customer Benefits:

• High availability – Heritage gained greater than ‘six
  nines’ availability for its business-critical online auctions.
• Easily scalable – Heritage now can handle global
  auctions with the ability to expand capacity into petabytes for its growing
  clientele and image library.
• Increased performance – Flash drives enable SQL Server
  applications to respond nearly instantaneously, improving the
  online auction customer experience.
• Improved efficiency – Automated storage tiering optimizes
  system performance to enable faster response to bidders while reducing TCO.
• Ease of management – Access to tier-one storage without the
  need for dedicated storage administrators.
• Fast installation – System installed in less than two hours
  with data migration from Xiotech to the VMAXe.
• Complete EMC Storage Infrastructure – Heritage also relies on
  EMC Isilon scale-out storage to efficiently and reliably manage tens of
  thousands of website images of auction items.

Heritage’s infrastructure was reaching its limit, impacting
the auction giant’s ability to scale,
support business growth and rapidly adopt virtualization. After evaluating EMC, 3Par, IBM, Xiotech, HP,
Hitachi and
Compellent, Heritage narrowed the field to EMC and 3Par, eventually selecting
EMC VMAXe through EMC Velocity Partner INX, to replace its Xiotech
infrastructure.

"Ultimately, it came down to who we could trust to have
our back if we ever needed help, and that was clearly EMC," said Brian
Carpenter, Director of Information Technology, Heritage Auctions. "EMC has done something truly
revolutionary in the way the VMAXe is bundled with everything you’d want in a
tier-one solution. Yet they’ve made it
very easy to manage for a mid-size shop like ours that doesn’t have dedicated
storage engineers. For example, the
multi-controller architecture gives us six to seven nines of availability,
making it easy for me to sleep at night knowing that our system is so
reliable. We even put the VMAXe front
and center in our data center so that customers and employees can see that
we’re using the latest and greatest state-of-the-art technology."

Heritage stores its most critical data on flash drives for
nearly instantaneous response times, which speeds up the bidding process and
creates a more positive experience for its customers. Meanwhile, the FAST VP tiering in VMAXe
ensures that any data needed by its website is on the fastest drives and
automatically places less-used data on lower-cost drives, allowing Heritage to
operate its storage at a lower cost.

"The VMAXe is incredibly easy to use and
adaptable," continued Carpenter.
"We were up and running with the system in less than two hours and
could migrate our data with just a point and click. The VMAXe makes it very easy to provision
storage and scale as we grow the business at about 20 percent each year."

"VMAXe opens the door for us to go full throttle with
virtualization and private cloud. We’re about 60 percent virtualized and our
goal is to reach 98 percent in less than 18 months," Carpenter said.
"All our web servers, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Cisco Unified
Communications, in-house tools- basically everything-will be virtualized,"
said Carpenter. "The VMAXe’s
integration with VMware, APIs and security technologies from RSA allows us to
accelerate very quickly to cloud."

Heritage VMAXe system is configured to scale to 1.14
petabytes of tiered storage across flash drives, 15,000 RPM FC
drives and 7,200 RPM SATA drives. With a
nearly 100 percent EMC storage environment, Heritage plans to run its most
critical Web and auction applications on flash drives for maximum performance;
Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint run on FC for high performance;
and less critical applications are stored on the SATA drives. VMAXe includes EMC’s Fully Automated Storage
Tiering – Virtual Pools (FAST VP), which automatically optimizes placement of
data on each tier.

Heritage experiences the greatest amount of growth from the
web images that it stores – Big Data that consumes a lot of storage. EMC’s Isilon system serves up images almost
instantly and contributes to a better overall experience for Heritage’s
customers. Over 35 million website images managed by SQL Server and
LiquidPixels are stored on Isilon scale-out storage which is configured to
scale to 15 petabytes.