EMC Press Release:

Sekisui Diagnostics Chooses EMC over NetApp and Dell for Flexibility and Scalability

Medical Diagnostics Manufacturer Reduces Time to Deliver IT Resources by 85% as Infrastructure Capacity Doubles

HOPKINTON, MASS. , NOVEMBER 14, 2012 - 

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Sekisui Diagnostics, a manufacturer of innovative medical diagnostic solutions, has standardized on EMC® technologies to implement a brand-newdata center infrastructure in only three months as part of its divesture from Genzyme Corporation. Sekisui Diagnostics selectedEMC VNX® over NetApp and Dell storage to more efficiently and easily manage rapid business growth, while improving response time for IT requests. Sekisui 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 VMware® vSphere™, enabling it to provision new virtual machines 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%.
• Improved Efficiency—Since implementing a FLASH 1st automated tiering strategy with EMC VNX, Sekisui can spend more time delivering value-added IT services instead of on administrative tasks for its mission-critical applications.
• Backup Simplicity—With EMC Avamar’s inherently simple management, Sekisui can effectively 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 an efficient, powerful and simple data center for its new operation. Sekisui also looked to implement a reliable and efficient tapeless backup and recovery solution that could scale as its business expanded.

The company closely evaluated EMC, NetApp and Dell solutions as the cornerstone infrastructure for its new data center. The company ultimately determined that EMC VNX unified storage provided the most efficient solution for rapidly 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 only three months.

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

CUSTOMER QUOTES:

Michael DiBenedetto, Manager of IT Infrastructure Services. Sekisui Diagnostics

More Efficient Storage Infrastructure
“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 virtual machines 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.”

Simple, Cost-Effective Backups
“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.”

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• Read the Customer Profile
• Learn more about EMC Avamar and EMC VNX
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

ABOUT EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.