HOPKINTON, Mass., Feb. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: [ EMC ]) today announced that the government of Balen, Belgium replaced its NetApp solution with [ EMC® VNXe™ unified storage ] for its "no compromise" simplicity, efficiency, and affordability. As a result, the Belgian municipality achieved a 25% operational efficiency boost and enabled more responsive, cost-effective government services for its citizens. With an IT infrastructure that is 99% virtualized, the VNXe provides simpler provisioning of Balen's VMware virtual machines, while reducing power and cooling costs.

Customer Benefits:

Increased Efficiency—The VNXe unified storage system provided Balen with a 25% increase in operational efficiency compared to its previous NetApp storage solution.
Increased Scalability—Balen has doubled the number of virtual servers running on its VNXe with room for continued growth.
Improved Responsiveness—The integration between VNXe and VMware ESXI virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies enables Balen to deploy new virtual machines in just minutes—compared to days and sometimes weeks it took with NetApp.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Balen was aggressively virtualizing its server infrastructure with VMware ESXI, but quickly realized that its NetApp storage systems would require significant overhaul to keep pace. The 21,000 citizen municipality considered expanding the NetApp system but found it would be more expensive than acquiring a new platform. Keeping within its tight IT budget, and with the goal of meeting its scalability demands at an affordable cost, Balen decided to deploy a new storage infrastructure.

Balen needed a storage solution that provided greater capacity—yet was simple to manage within a nearly 100% virtualized infrastructure. With the help of EMC Velocity partner 3-IT, Balen selected VNXe unified storage for its simplicity, efficiency, affordability, scalability, and industry-leading VMware integration.

Deployed in just two hours, the VNXe supports Balen's municipal government staff members with a wide range of applications, such as a time registration system, running on 20 VMware virtual machines. To manage the VNXe environment, Balen uses EMC Unisphere™, which provides intuitive wizard-based storage provisioning and rapid deployment of VMware virtual machines.

Customer Quotes:

Bjorn Claes, System Administrator, Municipality of Balen, Belgium

"The implementation of the VNXe went really well. We installed the VNXe in just two hours, outside of the normal workday. We were very pleased with the support from EMC and our local partner, 3-IT. Their in-depth technical knowledge, flexibility and open communications helped the project proceed smoothly."

"With NetApp, we were limited in our ability to introduce new applications because of the cost and time required to purchase physical servers. We can be more agile with EMC and respond more quickly to the growing needs of our municipality. With our VNXe and VMware infrastructure, we have the capacity and performance to continually enhance the applications that our 110 staff members rely on to serve the public."

"The VNXe provides the capacity, performance and VMware integration to greatly expand our use of virtual machines. The more virtual servers we implement, the greater the return on our IT infrastructure investments. Since deploying the VNXe, we have doubled the number of virtual machines in our environment and have implemented numerous new projects while maintaining excellent performance. This would not have been possible in our previous NetApp environment."

"With the VNXe, we have become 25% more efficient in managing out storage environment and configuring VMware data stores than with our previous NetApp solution. The big difference is Unisphere, which makes it easy to work with both the VNXe and VMware environments in a single interface. This is especially important since we only have one IT administrator for the entire municipality."

"With the help of VNXe and our broad use of virtualization, we have dramatically reduced the costs of cooling and electricity, as well as our physical footprint."

"The reliability of the VNXe has been great. Its redundant storage processors provide us with much higher availability that our old NetApp systems, which is as important in government as it is in business. All of our municipal services are dependent on the IT infrastructure. Without it, our staff members are unable to perform their jobs and provide critical services to the public."

About VNX

The award-winning VNX Family offers customers simple, efficient, affordable and powerful unified storage optimized for virtualized application environments. With the EMC FAST Suite, VNX customers can cost-effectively leverage the benefits of Flash performance --with "no compromise". VNXe offers an affordable unified storage platform for smaller businesses with solution-focused software that's easy to manage, provision, and protect. The Family dramatically simplifies the deployment and management of virtualized applications, including those from Microsoft, Oracle, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions from VMware and Citrix.

Additional Resources:

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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 ].

EMC, Unisphere, VNX and VNXe are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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Belgian Municipality Swaps NetApp for EMC VNXe Unified Storage, Gains 25% Operational Efficiency

Belgian Municipality Swaps NetApp for EMC VNXe Unified Storage, Gains 25% Operational Efficiency

VNXe Deployed in Just Two Hours, Supports 99% Virtualized IT Infrastructure