EMC announced that Denton, TX, a city near the Dallas Ft. Worth metroplex, is standardizing on EMC technology. The city will be leveraging products such as EMC’s storage products EMC VNX and EMC VPLEX Metro. Denton was also able to virtualize 90 percent of infrastructure, which has significantly reduced cost and management effort.

Prior to standardizing on EMC, the City of Denton leveraged a NetApp-based storage infrastructure, but the environment wasn’t providing enough capacity or performance to meet the municipality’s needs. In addition, Denton ‘s disaster recovery plan was not sufficient to ensure business continuity, which was an enormous risk because an outage could reduce the city’s revenue by $180,000 per day. These issues prompted the city to transition from its NetApp, IBM and Dell Compellent storage infrastructure to EMC VNX with EMC FAST Suite. EMC Fast allows the City of Denton to store their active data on Flash drives instead of traditional hard disks, which improves the performance of application data access.

Denton also created a new remote disaster recovery center. EMC’s virtual storage platform, VPLEX Metro, has a “Federated Access Anywhere” feature that allows the city to share resources across data centers and ensure users have continuous access to data in the event of a disaster. This architecture combined with virtualization allowed Denton to avoid the cost of acquiring new, dedicated disaster recovery infrastructure that would likely sit unused for significant portions of time.

The City of Denton said that transitioning to an EMC-based infrastructure has increased performance, simplified administration and improved their continuity. Representatives cited specific benefits such as:

• 230 percent increase in storage performance since moving to a “FLASH 1^st” strategy with EMC’s unified storage platform, VNX
• Reduction in system administration hours due to the integration between VNX and VMWare
• Improved business continuity and disaster recovery

We will likely see other organizations with strained budgets and a need for 24/7 availability continue to move to more virtualized environments and the cloud for both their disaster recovery and production needs. The technologies were once considered cutting edge, but now they have matured to a point that even historically cautious organizations like government and financial institutions are adopting virtualization in favor of traditional infrastructure.