Sekisui Diagnostics Chooses EMC Over NetApp and Dell

EMC Corporation announced
that Sekisui Diagnostics, LLC, a
manufacturer of medical diagnostic solutions, has standardized on EMC
technologies to implement a new data center infrastructure in
three months as part of its divesture from Genzyme Corporation.

Sekisui Diagnostics selected EMC VNX over NetApp and Dell storage to manage business growth, while improving response time for IT requests. It
is also using EMC Avamar for its centralized backup and recovery solution,
eliminating the former requirement of deploying backup hardware at all of its
sites. Tight integration between VNX and VMware has enabled Sekisui to achieve
a 90% virtualized environment using vSphere, enabling it to provision
new VMs in minutes.

Customer Benefits:

• 
  Quicker fulfillment of business requests: Sekisui’s IT organization has
  reduced time to deliver new IT resources to internal users, even as
  infrastructure capacity and the number of requests for services increase by
  50%.
• Efficiency: Since
  implementing a FLASH 1st automated tiering strategy with VNX, Sekisui can
  spend more time delivering value-added IT services instead of on administrative
  tasks for its applications.
• Backup Simplicity: With EMC ‘s
  simple management, Sekisui can manage backups around the
  globe from a single centralized location.
• Cost-Effective Backups: Avamar has
  enabled Sekisui to avoid capital cost by not having to deploy backup hardware
  at all of its sites.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Sekisui Diagnostics was tasked with building its own data center from
scratch. Having previously relied on shared IT services from Genzyme, the
company was seeking an IT infrastructure solution to provide a data center for its new operation. Sekisui also
looked to implement a  tapeless backup and
recovery solution that could scale as its business expanded.

The company evaluated EMC, NetApp and Dell solutions as the cornerstone
infrastructure for its new data center. The company
determined that EMC VNX unified storage provided the most efficient solution
for rolling out a new data center while providing the flexibility to support
anticipated growth. With the help of EMC and GreenPages Technology Solutions,
an EMC Velocity solution provider, Sekisui was able to go live with its brand
new data center in three months.

• Efficient storage infrastructure: For
  improved performance and efficiency, the medical diagnostics manufacturer’s
  VNX unified storage leverages a FLASH 1st strategy to move data based on
  activity level, optimizing for cost and performance simultaneously. Sekisui has standardized on VNX storage to support its enterprise applications,
  including Oracle for sales forecasting, SQL Server for document
  management, Exchange email and MFG Pro enterprise resource planning. In
  addition, it has virtualized 90% of the environment using vSphere
  virtualization.
• Simple,
  Cost-Effective Backups: The company is also
  protecting its diverse client set on both physical and virtualized servers with Avamar deduplication backup software and system. With Avamar’s simple
  management, Sekisui is able to manage backup and recovery processes in
  the US, Canada and the UK from a central location.

Michael DiBenedetto, manager of IT
Infrastructure Services. Sekisui Diagnostics, said:" We
looked at Dell and NetApp, but they didn’t offer the same flexibility and
scalability that EMC provides. As a new and much smaller company, we’ve valued
the scalability of EMC’s VNX storage because we have the flexibility to adapt
as our workload demands change. We also haven’t needed to rip and replace
hardware in the data center as internal demand has grown.

"EMC
and GreenPages were very responsive with our technical requirements. Combine
that with the VNX system’s built-in automation and multi-protocol support, and
we met our very aggressive objective of our new data center going live in just
three months.

"Over
the last three months, our infrastructure capacity has doubled while the number
of requests from users and developers has increased by 50%. Yet even as we
grow, the timeline to fulfill IT requests has dropped from a week down to one
or two days. With the tight integration between VNX and VMware, we’re far more
agile and responsive to the business than we anticipated. We are able to
provision VMs in minutes for example.

"We
have minimal IT staff to handle day-to-day operations, so we wanted a system
that would do that for us. With VNX and a FLASH 1st strategy, we have avoided
all the management headaches and we don’t even need a dedicated storage
administrator. That’s huge for us.

"Our previous experience with
tape backups led us to search for a more reliable backup solution that could
scale as our business expanded. With Avamar, we have been able to create a
completely tapeless backup environment that is incredibly reliable, scalable
and efficient. We’ve seen a tremendous decrease in recovery times and the data
reduction benefits are just amazing.

"We can manage backups in the US,
Canada and the UK from a central location in Canada. We’ve been able to achieve
time and cost savings by not having to deploy hardware in all of our backup
sites. The operational efficiency of our backup environment is incredibly
important, and with Avamar backup is now a simple and predictable process.

"We realize that we back up a
significant amount of similar data from multiple sources. With Avamar we’ve
achieved a deduplication ratio of 100:1 and have significantly reduced the
amount of data we are backing up at any point in time."