Online Superstore Standardizes On EMC To Drive Rapid Sales Growth

HOPKINTON, Mass., Feb. 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that AutomationDirect.com, a leading online superstore of industrial controls products, has standardized on EMC ^® VMAX® 10K with FAST™ VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) and other EMC software. AutomationDirect.com is leveraging these EMC technologies to drive rapid business expansion and reduce costs while rolling out strategic initiatives, including disaster recovery, virtualized desktop computing and Big Data analytics.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Efficiency — By consolidating 50 storage devices onto VMAX 10K, AutomationDirect.com has decreased its data center footprint by 50% while increasing storage utilization by 160%.
• Cost Savings — With FAST VP, AutomationDirect.com has reduced the time spent managing storage to almost zero while improving performance to support rapid business growth.
• Simplified Administration — AutomationDirect.com's IT staff have reduced time spent on storage provisioning by 5X, freeing up valuable resources.
• Improved Availability — Frequent periods of downtime lasting an hour or more have completely disappeared since AutomationDirect.com standardized on VMAX.
• Enabled Business Growth  — VMAX 10K has enabled AutomationDirect.com to roll out its Big Data analytics strategy to streamline the product launch process from weeks to just days.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

AutomationDirect.com was experiencing tremendous business growth.  Its decentralized IBM storage infrastructure had become highly inefficient and lacked the performance and reliability it required.

After reviewing solutions from EMC, Hitachi, IBM, NetApp and 3Par, AutomationDirect.com selected EMC VMAX 10K powerful, trusted and smart storage and FAST VP automated storage tiering software to optimize overall performance and efficiency—while leveraging the expertise of EMC Global Services.  In addition, the company is implementing EMC RecoverPoint™ continuous data protection and VMware ^® vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager (SRM) solutions to enable disaster recovery with replication of its storage and virtual machines to a remote VMAX 10K.

Approximately 80% of AutomationDirect.com's server infrastructure is virtualized using VMware vSphere ^™.  EMC VMAX 10K stores 200 VMware virtual machines running Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Epicor Prophet 21 enterprise resource planning (ERP), and PathGuide Latitude warehouse management system, among other applications including its homegrown Big Data Analytics application.

Customer Quotes:

Trace Nabors, Systems Administrator, AutomationDirect.com

"Since leveraging FAST VP to automatically tier data, we are spending much less time and money on storage. We are achieving the performance we need without distributed storage systems sitting in the data center taking up unnecessary and precious space."

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