MANUFACTURING

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced that Experian has implemented EMC networked storage and storage management software, as well as utilized EMC professional services to build the foundation for its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. Experian, a leading U.S. credit bureau and provider of demographic data and database marketing services, has dramatically cut costs and increased efficiency by recognizing that information at various points in its lifecycle requires different levels of availability, performance and management functionality. Ernie Demers, Experian's Manager of UNIX Infrastructure and Storage, said, "Our database marketing business has grown exponentially over the past four years and now our data warehouse receives more queries than any other worldwide. In the same period, our storage environment has grown from 1 ½ to 210 terabytes. To make sure we're growing efficiently, we need to be extremely focused on lowering our costs and squeezing more value from our IT investments. Working with EMC to develop and execute an ILM strategy has proven to be an expedient way to achieve these goals since we're able to align our storage infrastructure to the changing value of our information. In fact, for one client alone, we were able to save more than half a million dollars by moving 12 ½ terabytes from our high-end storage to our mid-tier storage. Extrapolate those savings across our enterprise and we're talking about savings of several million dollars each year and a 100% return on investment in two years." Demers views EMC ControlCenter storage management software as key to Experian's ILM strategy. "We've looked at management software from other vendors, but nothing comes close to the deep management capabilities of EMC ControlCenter. We use ControlCenter to produce detailed reports on how much of our storage is being utilized, exactly where our data sits and what applications and network switches are connected to our storage. This visibility is crucial to deciding what data belongs where and when it's appropriate to move it to a different tier of storage. ControlCenter has been a big help in identifying performance inefficiencies. When an issue arises, we can see exactly where the bottleneck is. Previously, it could take days and outside assistance to resolve it. Now we can address such problems in a matter of hours. That's huge for us." According to the Winter Group, Experian operates the world's fourth-largest data warehouse. With credit and demographic data on more than 215 million consumers, Experian stores its most active, time-sensitive data and applications, such as Oracle-based decision support and search and retrieval, on high-performance EMC Symmetrix networked storage systems. As this data ages and is accessed less often, it is moved to mid-tier EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems, which also is the location for Experian's application development-related data. Also at the mid-tier, Experian uses EMC CLARiiON with ATA systems to store information, such as documents that have very low access requirements. In its network-attached storage (NAS) environment, Experian employs the EMC Celerra NS600G gateway to support file servers, Exchange email, human resources applications, and other types of flat file or archival data that needs to be accessible online, but does not require the availability or performance of Symmetrix and CLARiiON networked storage. EMC Technology Solutions consultants have been critical to the success of Experian's EMC implementation. "We challenged EMC professional services to come up with a way to support our huge high-end data store with one EMC Symmetrix," said Demers. "They analyzed our storage and production infrastructures and developed a plan to spread out the processing workload to avoid bottlenecks and 'hot disks.' With their assistance, we implemented Symmetrix, which has stood up to the heaviest processing loads we've thrown at it." With a North America headquarters office in Costa Mesa, Calif., Experian relies on EMC to provide consolidated storage to its IBM 900 mainframes, as well as Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Windows 2000 and Linux servers. In addition to ControlCenter, Experian uses EMC storage management and business continuity software, such as EMC TimeFinder, EMC PowerPath, EMC InfoMover, EMC SAN Copy and EMC SnapView software.