Power company Ameren has selected EMC Symmetrix VMAX, a storage array to manage its explosive data growth in a mission-critical Oracle database and custom application environment.
The EMC Symmetrix VMAX implementation supports Ameren’s new initiatives, while accelerating its adoption of a private cloud infrastructure with VMware vSphere virtualisation and cloud infrastructure technologies.
Ameren deployed a VMAX storage system with enterprise Flash, Fibre Channel and SATA drives to meet the need for increased scalability and performance while also taking advantage of EMC FAST to reduce costs.
With EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), Ameren has reduced annual capital expenses by 50% and by using EMC VMAX, Ameren has increased its transactional performance by 30% and batch processing performance by nearly 20%.
Consolidating on EMC VMAX enables Ameren to achieve power and cooling savings of 28% and the company can now scale its data centre to handle unpredictable growth from smart grid and business analytics.
Ameren Hardware Infrastructure director John Hughes said Ameren chose EMC VMAX because it could reduce Ameren’s data centre footprint, lower Ameren’s power demand and fit the cost model.
"With VMAX’s excellent reliability and intelligent management tools, we’re spending less time on troubleshooting. In fact, our after-hours service calls dropped by half," said Hughes.
