State of Indiana Installing Two EMC Symmetrix VMAX

EMC Corporation announced that the State of Indiana ‘s Office of Technology (IOT) has consolidated its information infrastructure on EMC Symmetrix VMAX with Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP).

The State selected this solution to support its mission-critical applications and has improved the performance, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its datacenter operations.

EMC ranks as the #1 storage choice for Oracle, Microsoft and other mission critical environments according to a new global end user survey by IDC. The survey ranks storage vendors based on customer deployment patterns within the most widely-used enterprise applications. According to the IDC report, more customers choose EMC storage than any other vendor’s for their SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Home Directories environments.

Customer Benefits

• Increased Performance – The State of Indiana has increased performance of its datacenter storage infrastructure by 27% as a result of implementing VMAX with FAST VP to intelligently automate the placement of data across various disk drive tiers for maximum performance, utilization and efficiency.
• Improved Efficiency – By consolidating onto a single VMAX system, it has increased capacity by 30% while cutting system footprint in half and reducing power and cooling demand by more than 50%.
• Improved Productivity – It has reduced the number of administrators needed for storage maintenance, freeing them up for other more strategic projects. What used to consume the time of one and a half administrators now requires less than one.

Customer Challenges and Solution
IOT, which manages the technology infrastructure for the governor’s office and executive branch agencies as well as sets direction for information technology for all of State government, experienced challenges managing its IT infrastructure due to data growth of 30% annually. With mandates from government officials to run government more efficiently, IOT needed to consolidate onto al tiered enterprise storage platform that could scale to meet is data growth while improving IT staff productivity.

IOT implemented a VMAX with FAST VP for its ability to scale and meet the demands of its growing IT environment and support its mission-critical applications including Oracle databases, Microsoft Exchange email and Microsoft SQL Server databases, as well as in-house applications developed with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

The State also deployed a second VMAX for disaster recovery at a second data center located in southern Indiana . Additionally, it uses EMC replication solutions, such as SRDF, TimeFinder, RecoverPoint, HomeBase and Replication Manager for business continuity.

Jim Rose, Enterprise Architect and Manager – Storage Services, Indiana Office of Technology, said: "EMC storage is incredibly reliable, so when we decided to consolidate our existing systems onto a single, tiered enterprise platform, Symmetrix VMAX was the platform we trusted. It has helped us transform the way we manage our storage infrastructure in a cost effective manner while improving the quality of our services. With EMC’s sophisticated replication technologies, such as SRDF and RecoverPoint, we trust that we’d be able to recover all of our critical applications at our remote site if a disaster were to significantly damage our infrastructure.

"FAST VP has made it very easy for us to allocate storage and utilize our capacity in the most efficient way. It’s so smart that we just click and forget about it. As a result, we’ve seen performance gains of 27% while reducing our admin time by 50% on activities such as storage allocation and performance analysis. What used to consume the time of one and a half administrators now requires less than one. Our staff can instead spend more time architecting new solutions."