Rotary International Transforms With EMC VNXe and Isilon

EMC Corporation announced that Rotary International,
a global humanitarian service organization, has transformed its IT
infrastructure and standardized on EMC storage and backup and recovery
technologies.

With 90% of its IT environment virtualized, Rotary has built a foundation
for improving the availability of its applications
including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle PeopleSoft, SAP
business intelligence and Avectra netFORUM customer relationship management
(CRM), while boosting the performance, efficiency and scalability of its IT
infrastructure.

Rotary has implemented EMC VNXe, Isilon, Avamar and
RecoverPoint as well as VMware vSphere and is using a VCE Vblock Infrastructure
Platform that integrates VNX unified storage, VMware vSphere virtualization
and cloud technologies and Cisco networking and Unified Computing System (UCS)
technologies. Rotary is using its Vblock platform for its applications and primary storage, while leveraging a VNXe storage system at a
second facility to replicate data.

Customer Benefits:

• Management: Rotary has reduced everyday system management time by 25% since
  transforming its IT infrastructure.
• Data
  Protection: With EMC Avamar, Rotary has eliminated
  tape and reduced the window for full backups from 72 hours to just two hours, a
  32X improvement in time to backup.
• Predictable Performance: Rotary’s ‘FLASH 1st’ strategy using EMC’s FAST (automated storage tiering) Suite on its Vblock platform ensured that the most
  utilized data was stored on the highest performing media, including flash
  drives.
• Efficiency: After transforming its IT infrastructure, Rotary reduced time to
  deliver new projects to its internal clients from days to hours, enabling IT
  staff to be more proactive in supporting Rotary’s overall humanitarian mission.
• Managing Digital Assets: EMC Isilon scale-out NAS delivers increased performance, capability
  and scalability for Rotary’s growing digital assets.

Customer challenges and solution:
With greater use of digital media in its program promotion and
demand for speedier grants’ management, Rotary saw its data volume grow
approximately 400% in just 18 months. To handle this massive data growth,
Rotary’s lean IT staff needed to simplify manageability while enabling
cost-effective scalability and maintaining high performance.

A long-time EMC and VMware customer, Rotary decided to transform its
IT environment in the second quarter of 2011. Rotary selected Isilon during
the second quarter of 2011 to better manage its growing digital assets to
complement its existing Avamar solution to backup its entire IT
infrastructure, having eliminated all tape from its IT environment.

The final stage of Rotary’s transformation included the adoption of
an integrated converged infrastructure. Their VCE Vblock platform brings
together storage, networking, server and virtualization technologies to
support workloads with performance, availability and simplified management of the infrastructure. To
maximize the performance of its applications, Rotary is using the FAST
Suite on its Vblock to employ a ‘Flash 1st’ strategy, ensuring that
the most important, active data is stored on flash drives for maximum performance,
while older, inactive data is stored on inexpensive, high capacity drives for
optimal TCO.

Jon Shulda, SAN and VMware Administrator, Rotary International,
said:

On IT transformation:
"We needed to transform
our IT infrastructure and processes to better support our strategic goals of
increasing visibility of the Rotary brand. Leveraging EMC, VMware and VCE, many
of our internal IT resources have transitioned away from an operational role to
focus more on delivering new projects to our internal and external clients.
Time to deliver underlying infrastructure for new projects has been reduced
from a couple days to just a few hours in most cases; allowing us to be more
proactive to the needs of organization. We’re also able to ensure our
mission-critical applications like SQL Server, SharePoint and Oracle are
well-protected and scale to new data loads.

On its storage environment:
"The VNXe was a breeze to
implement. We were out of the box and production-ready in about two hours. EMC
Unisphere allows us to manage all our resources with a single interface. We can
easily manage our infrastructure on a daily basis and leverage Unisphere’s
features when performing system upgrades.

"Provisioning storage on
the Vblock platform has improved greatly after implementing a ‘FLASH 1st’
strategy because EMC FAST VP automatically distributes data onto the right tier
of storage and expands and contracts virtual storage pools as needed. As a
result, we’ve reduced the time we spend on day-to-day system management by 25%.
Despite our IT infrastructure growing by 400% in the past 18 months our IT
staff has remained the same size and can manage the growth easily with our EMC
infrastructure.

"EMC’s close partnership
with VMware, Cisco and VCE ensures all products are working in harmony. We know
EMC will stand behind the entire solution. We rely on the Vblock platform to
support our mission-critical applications and we have complete confidence in
its ability to meet our strict SLA’s.

"We also rely on EMC
Isilon to provide high-performance, low-latency storage to meet our multimedia
initiatives need. Isilon integrated seamlessly into our environment and has
proven to be a reliable solution to manage our multimedia files, allowing us to
grow seamlessly as our multimedia assets grow.

On backup and eliminating tape:
"In addition, EMC Avamar
continues to be a key part of our infrastructure and has been for a number of
years. Before we implemented Avamar, our full tape backups would run for more
than 72 hours and often included failed backups. Now, after completely
eliminating tape from our environment and with Avamar, we have achieved 92%
data deduplication with Avamar, and most of our backups complete in just two
hours."