Furniture Manufacturer Smith Brothers of Berne Prefers EMC VNX

EMC Corporation announced that Smith Brothers of Berne, Inc., a
manufacturer of fine residential upholstered furniture, selected EMC over HP
and Dell , Inc. to transform its IT infrastructure.

Smith Brothers improved system performance, efficiency and availability of its
virtualized and ERP
applications including Infor10 ERP Business, SQL, SharePoint and Exchange with
EMC storage and DR technologies.

The company also accelerated its just-in-time manufacturing strategy of
reducing in-process inventory and the associated carrying costs for fulfillment
of custom furniture orders – overall increasing IT efficiency and customer
satisfaction.

Customer Benefits:

• Reliability: Smith Brothers reduced downtime, improved the speed of its supply
  chain processing and furthered its ongoing commitment to high customer
  satisfaction.
• Performance: VNXe
  increased the performance of Smith Brothers’ applications by 30%, improving the
  speed of its supply chain.
• ROI: It expects return on its investment in 24 months from its
  implementation of VNXe and the increased reliability and performance that it
  provides.
• Business agility: VNXe’s scalability
  and integration with VMware accelerated Smith Brothers virtualization strategy
  and rollout of new applications, supporting faster time to market of new
  furniture lines.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

To meet its three-week delivery timeframes as a just-in-time
manufacturer of custom furniture, Smith Brothers depends on lean
manufacturing processes. As its data volumes increased, its prior DAS solution was no longer providing the performance and
system availability demanded by its applications.

With each manufacturing downtime incident costing the company $25,000 and
negatively impacting employee productivity, Smith Brothers needed to find a
solution that would no longer put the company at risk of missing order
deadlines and enable its infrastructure growth.

After considering Dell and HP storage solutions, it
chose VNXe unified storage to transform its IT infrastructure, with the
help of EMC Velocity Solution Provider BSA Data Solutions LLC.

Smith Brothers selected VNXe to improve system performance and reliability
and the company leverages Local Protection Suite and point in time recovery. It relies on the VNXe for its virtualized environments, including
its Infor10 ERP Business and SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange.

Additionally, Smith Brothers has virtualized 95% of its server infrastructure
with vSphere. With the tight integration between VMware and VNXe
environments, the company is able to implement new virtual machines in two
hours.

Derek Augsburger, network manager, Smith Brothers of Berne, said: "Even though we distribute furniture across
the U.S., we’re still a relatively small business. VNXe provided the perfect
price point with enterprise-level performance, reliability and agility for a
company our size. We were up and running in only four hours and this was our
first foray into unified storage. While you need some IT background, you don’t
have to be a storage specialist to deploy VNXe.

"With VNXe, performance
of our virtualized applications has increased by 30%. Jobs that used to take a
few minutes now take seconds. These improvements help speed up our supply
chain, which is the heart of our business.

"Our virtualization
journey would not have been possible without VNXe’s excellent VMware
integration and performance. We are rolling out a new ERP system which before
would have required about seven to ten days from procurement to implementation
of the servers. Now with the tight integration between our VMware and VNXe
environments, we’re able to implement new virtual machines in just two hours. We’ve
also been able to add disk drives without disrupting our applications, which
provides us with higher density within our storage frame. With such agility, we
can improve our time to market of new furniture lines and increase our
competitive advantage.

"In only 24 months, we
expect to break even with EMC’s VNXe because of its excellent performance,
reliability and ease of use. If we can avoid one instance of a four-hour
production outage, the VNXe pays for itself almost immediately.

"Manufacturing reliability
is huge because we’re a just-in-time manufacturer that’s committed to
delivering custom-made furniture within three weeks of our customers placing
their orders. Previously, when we had an outage, it would cost us $25,000 per
downtime incident because manufacturing would halt and we risked disappointing
customers with late orders. With EMC, we don’t have to worry about
outages. Today, we can focus more on satisfying our customers because of
the reliability provided by VNXe unified storage."