Austrian Publisher Mediaprint Acquires EMC VNX

EMC Corporation announced that Mediaprint Reitungs- und Zeitschriftenverlag GmbH, the largest a newspaper
and magazine publisher in Wien, Austria, has transformed its IT infrastructure with EMC
VNX unified storage, EMC VPLEX Metro virtual storage and VMware virtualization
solutions.

The solutions have enabled Mediaprint to increase application
performance by 300%, achieve five-nines availability for critical publishing,
editorial and production systems, as well as accelerate virtualization of its
IT infrastructure.

Customer Benefits:

• 
  Accelerated Virtualization: Integration between VNX and VMware provided the performance and availability to advance its virtualization strategy
  and increase the number of VMs by 8X in 18 months.
• Application Availability: By
  running applications simultaneously across two data centers with VPLEX,
  Mediaprint achieved five-nines availability for its SAP and Oracle
  applications.
• Performance: Leveraging a
  FLASH 1st strategy, Mediaprint improved response times for SAP by 300% and
  increased performance of its Oracle data warehouse by 500%, ensuring timely
  delivery of news stories.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Following
years of business growth, Mediaprint had expanded its infrastructure to the
point where its servers and storage environment reached capacity limits. The
productivity of editorial, advertising and business users was being affected by
slower application performance. In addition, the sprawling infrastructure was
difficult to manage and exposed it to the risk of losing editorial
content should a data center outage occur.

To address these
challenges, Mediaprint selected VNX and VPLEX Metro solutions to
consolidate three data centers down to two. VNX provides Mediaprint with a
FLASH 1st automated storage tiering strategy that leverages the EMC FAST Suite
to improve performance and lower TCO, while VPLEX Metro allows
resources to be used simultaneously in an active-active mode across both data
centers that are 26 kilometers (16.16 miles) apart. The solution supports
all of Mediaprint’s SAP advertising management applications, as well
as Oracle databases running its editorial and logistics systems.

Leveraging EMC storage
and vSphere solutions, Mediaprint has virtualized its critical SAP applications
and is rapidly virtualizing the rest of its infrastructure, including Oracle
databases. The company also relies on VMware vMotion for migration of VMs
between its two data centers. It has achieved much faster application response times for its users,
simplified IT administration and increased application availability.

Ferdinand Karner, head
of department, systems and database services, Mediaprint, said: "SAP and Oracle are our most important
business systems. Some companies fear virtualizing such critical applications,
but the integration across our EMC and VMware environments gave us the
confidence to virtualize SAP and Oracle and ultimately all of our enterprise
applications.

"We looked at several options, but only EMC
had the right combination of performance, availability and ease of management
that enabled us to rapidly virtualize our infrastructure. In just 18 months, we
have increased the number of VMs by 8X.

"With EMC and VMware, we’ve seen a 300%
improvement in response times for some SAP applications and performance of our
Oracle data warehouses have increased by 500%. Editorial and business staff can
work faster so that important news stories and advertising copy are delivered
quickly and efficiently.

"VPLEX Metro allows us to run applications at
full tilt from either of our two data centers simultaneously even though
they’re 26 kilometers apart. Every part of our editorial system is
time-critical. And without our logistics system we can’t print newspapers. Any
downtime or delay can mean loss of revenue. VPLEX Metro was the only solution
that fit our needs because it provides full redundancy across both data center
without a single point of failure. We now have five-nines availability and our latency
is just one millisecond, which is excellent.

"We have a small IT department and can’t
spend all day administering storage. Using the FAST Suite, we don’t have to
worry about prioritizing our Flash drives for our most demanding applications –
it’s all done automatically, and the administrative interface with VNX is
simple to use. So we get a performance boost and more time for IT projects that
help streamline and accelerate our publishing operations.

"EMC helped us to achieve our IT
transformation over the last 18 months by offering the right products for
virtualization of both our storage and server layers. EMC’s excellent technical
support and commitment to our business also have contributed to making this
project so successful."