Converged & Networking Customer Stories

Celtic Manor Resort delivers faster, more personalised services to 1 million guests, boosts its innovation potential and cuts IT issues by 20% with Dell EMC VxRail.

“Applications are faster with Dell EMC VxRail. That means we can help people make reservations, check in and pay for services quicker. ”

- Chris Stanley, IT Manager, Celtic Manor Resort

To compete effectively in the growing private cloud market CenturyLink sought a way to meet customer demands for infrastructure cost reductions and increased deployment speeds. Since traditional infrastructure approaches of integrating storage, server, and networking technologies were too inefficient to meet these demands. CenturyLink alternatively pursued a converged infrastructure strategy based on VCE Vblock® Systems as the foundation for private clouds and augmented by its own managed services, co-location facilities, and public cloud offerings.

“ VCE and Vblock Systems bring CenturyLink a real competitive advantage. They address market demands for speed, agility, and lower cost. They allow our team to operate more efficiently. And they bring our customers proven, integrated technologies from three industry leaders. What more could you ask for? ”

- Michael Joffe, Director of Cloud Product Management, CenturyLink

Aware of rapidly emerging opportunities to use technology in its construction business in innovative ways, Cianbro knew that it was critical to modernize its data center.

“ Installing the VxBlock converged system allowed us to take a ten-year step forward in technology with a single purchase. By using VxBlock to transform our data center, we now have the ability to deploy solutions in hours as opposed to weeks. ”

- Ryan Deppe, Network Operations Supervisor, Cianbro Corporation

Traditionally, Convergys hosted its customer interaction solution on a stand-alone server or multiple servers. As user counts grew, the company needed to add servers to support additional voice ports and achieve the proper voice density required to support the application. This would add cost and complexity to each customer environment. Convergys decided that a hyper-converged solution would be the best alternative because it offers deeper voice density and simplified deployment and operations. Convergys conducted a proof of concept comparing a VxRail Appliance, another vendor's hyper-converged solution, and a standalone server environment. Convergys chose the VxRail Appliance because it led every requirement they tested against and provided a 20 percent performance gain over its existing approach.

“ The Vblock System can handle three times the performance required by our ArcGIS application. That headroom is important as Denton’s population and consumption of services grows and puts more demand on our IT infrastructure. ”

- Kevin Gunn, Director of Technology Services, City of Denton

With their system crashing because of the amount of transactions that they had and the time it took to process those transactions, The CSI Companies was experiencing a lot of downtime in their corporate services group. After implementing the Dell EMC VxRail Appliance, the improvements were instantaneous. No longer was the back office experiencing crashes, and processing speeds were above and beyond what they expected it to be.

“ Our use case for the Dell EMC VxRail Appliance was really to provide the maximum performance that we could to our applications, and the performance improvements that we have seen have been across the board. ”

- Matt Greaves, Director of IT, The CSI Companiess

Data Recognition Corporation has virtualized a completely physical environment onto the Dell EMC VxRail Appliance to provide them with flexibility, scalability and security for their enclave environment. They are now able to spend a lot less time focusing on IT and can spend more time planning and strategizing for the future.

“ The VxRail was able to give us that single appliance in a very small box and give us all the redundancy that we needed in order to handle the workload. ”

- Trevor Farnum, Senior Director Corporate Technology, Data Recognition Corporation

Dimension Data is leading the way in technology innovation within professional cycling by delivering real-time, mobile race analytics through a managed cloud platform built on DellEMC VxRail™ Appliance.

“ We’re very happy with our relationship with Dell EMC. They share our passion for innovation and thinking differently. ”

- Tim Wade, Sports Practice Senior Director, Architecture Dimension Data

Draper boosts innovation, cuts costs by 30 percent and increases IT staff productivity by 75 percent with an end-to-end solution from Dell Technologies.

“ With Dell Technologies, we get the IT we need to grow our business and support our internal customers, so they can… break the mold and truly innovate. ”

- Mike Crones, Chief Information Officer, Draper

EFH chose Dell EMC to power transformation of its IT infrastructure to meet competitive challenges and deliver business value. The company deployed Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on a Vblock Systems platform at both its production and backup data centers and quickly virtualized more than 99% of its infrastructure, totaling approximately 3,000 VMs. While the purchase and rollout of the solution required a major commitment with an investment approaching $20 million, EFH anticipates receiving total benefits in excess of $54 million through 2020. Among the other benefits EFH enjoyed were a 25% reduction in the total cost of IT, up to 50% improvement in performance, 50% decrease in the size of its infrastructure footprint, and 100% system availability.

“ The business case we put together for this converged and automation platform is based on a lot of these numbers that were around resource reduction, cost and licenses reductions, and server reductions. What we did was provide the value back to our business that says over the next five years we will reduce through hard and soft savings over $50 million on our budget. ”

- Paul Reyes, Vice President of Infrastructure and Security Services, Energy Future Holdings

A Vblock System 340 supports Equalit’s strategy to adopt innovative technology to improve the cost and performance of its services. The converged infrastructure serves a mixed workload environment for a wide range of applications utilized by seven local government authorities.

“ Equalit’s core value is to reduce dependencies and cost while improving quality. VCE helps us to do just that, with its robust and cost-effective Vblock System, which enables us to concentrate on our application services to local government. ”

- Willem Zwijger, General Manager, Equalit

By running its media center on Vblock Systems, FOX SPORTS transformed the way IT delivers services to the business. With a fully virtualized converged infrastructure, IT has moved away from siloes of physical infrastructure to an automated, software-defined environment that enables greater agility.

“ Since moving to Vblock Systems, we’re now 100% responsive to the business. And we’re innovating even more to put great sports content into the hands of our fans across numerous media platforms. ”

- Michael Tomkins, Chief Technology Officer, FOX SPORTS Australia

To capitalize on Federal incentives available to Gordon Memorial as a Critical Access Hospital (CAH), help improve patient care, and reduce IT costs, Fisher conducted a detailed review of technology solutions and selected MEDITECH 6.0 EHR software running on a VCE Vblock™ System.

“ By deploying a Vblock System from VCE, we expect to save an estimated $695,000 over a decade for services, support, hardware and staffing. For a hospital of our size, this is business-changing. We can put the savings towards new technologies to help improve patient outcomes, instead of using it on maintenance to keep the hospital systems up and running. It allows us to put our focus on what matters: our patients. ”

- Tyler Fisher Chief Information Officer Gordon Memorial Hospital

A Vblock 720 serves as the Target Platform for HealthEast’s Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, in addition to supporting more than 300 other applications to deliver a full continuum of care. Having a production-capable Vblock 720 in a secondary data center allows HealthEast to completely fail over to that location in the event of a disaster.

“ We now have our server and storage environment engineered five years out, plus a five-year total cost of ownership that’s projected to be 30% lower than before. So we know what our long-term expenses are going to be. The Vblock Systems have made our life better in so many ways. ”

- Lou Gallagher, Systems Director, HealthEast Care System

The Vblock System runs a suite of MEDITECH applications, including EMR, lab, pharmacy, health information management, general accounting, human resource planning, and supply chain management. In addition, IH relies on the Vblock System to run its McKesson PACS solution, Microsoft SQL Server applications, SpeechQ voice recognition for radiology, PICIS operating room management system.

“Ultimately, the Vblock System has helped IH deliver a better clinician experience, which leads to improved patient care. ”

- Mark Braidwood, Director, Infrastructure Technology Architecture and Services, Interior Health

VxRack FLEX advantages in both production and development environments shine for one of the world’s largest hotel brands. This international hospitality enterprise operates dozens ofhotel brands in over 100 countries worldwide.

“ They didn’t want to be stuck with just one hypervisor. VxRack FLEX gives them the capability to employ multiple hypervisors. ”

Johnsonville creates a robust environment that leverages converged and hyper-converged infrastructure reducing costs and administrative tasks while boosting the business value of technology.

“ Since implementing Dell EMC VxBlock and VxRail, we spend four to six hours per week managing systems, not up to three days. ”

- Corey Aponte, Server Administrator, Johnsonville

Vblock Systems resolved the most critical issue facing Kent State University: performance and availability during student registration. With a highly virtualized converged infrastructure, the university now has the agility and resilience to handle peak registration periods with ease.

“ The immediacy of access to services and information is a prime example of how VCE technology is helping students be more successful at school and ultimately reach their career goals. ”

- Andrea Nunley, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications, Kent State University

Kimpton built their private cloud solution on two Vblock Systems 320 in separate data centers, running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Citrix XenDesktop VDI, and SAP for business planning and reporting, among other applications.

“ Our Vblock Systems, enable us to roll out VMs and address business needs within minutes. Performance is also much higher than our past infrastructure for better response times. ”

- John Meng, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Enterprise Systems, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants

Land Rover BAR has sharpened its competitive edge with VCE VxRail™ Hyper-converged Infrastructure Appliance incorporating VMware virtualization and EMC storage and Isilon, to accelerate collaboration on boat development and honing sailing tactics.

“ As a first-generation America’s Cup team we’ve come a long way in a short time. We’ve still got a great deal to achieve, but I’m confident that with EMC we have the right tools and the right team to get out there, compete, and perform. ”

- Sir Ben Ainslie, Team Principal and Skipper, Land Rover BAR

As a licensed sports headwear and apparel company, Lids faces the ever-changing demands of the modern consumer and omni-channel retailing. In an effort to help customers get the products they want regardless of how they transact, the company turned to an all-flash VCE Vblock System 740 to transform IT. The converged infrastructure enabled Lids to become faster and more efficient while positioning the company for future growth. Vblock reduced Lids’ provisioning time, enabling jobs to run 20 percent faster, which enables the company to make faster business decisions, develop apps faster, and process and analyze its big data faster.

“ Our partnership with EMC is really allowing us to focus more on the business and less on the infrastructure day to day support types of things to gain as much efficiency as possible and ultimately figure out how to sell more. ”

- Tony Harte, Senior Director of Infrastructure & Business Solutions, Lids

With Vblock Systems, McCoy Global reduced the time for onboarding new acquisitions from years to days while increasing end-user computing performance to accelerate innovation and competitive advantage.

“ Moving to a Vblock System allows the business to focus on innovation and expansion without being burdened by IT limitations. We can now provide IT resources to the business far more quickly, so our management team is more confident when making strategic decisions that will impact growth. ”

- Justin Beauchamp, IT Infrastructure Manager, McCoy Global

Once the Vblock System was built and delivered, it was up and running within hours. The new converged infrastructure has allowed Melbourne Airport to replace three separate vendors, with compute and storage now managed as one coherent platform.

“ The system manages storage and capacity itself, which allows my team to focus on more strategic activities. We’re delivering better value, and turning on features we haven’t been able to in the past. ”

- Paul Bunker, Executive, Business Systems & ICT, Melbourne Airport

Mercy Ships uses Dell EMC VxRail appliances running vSAN in its Texas data center and is adding VxRail on two hospital ships that bring volunteer medical teams to underdeveloped areas.

Mohawk Industries is increasing operational efficiencies and product quality with SAP HANA on Vblock and XtremIO.

“ Why do I love EMC? Well, it’s easy. It’s the close partnership and relationship that EMC has built with me and Mohawk Industries. They’ve empowered me by not just selling me a solution, but selling me success. ”

- Vince Zuk, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture, Mohawk

Running key business applications on-premises with PowerEdge servers delivers the performance and flexibility one of America's largest craft brewers needs while also lowering costs.

“ There isn’t a facet of our business processes that technology doesn’t touch. ”

- Travis Morrison, director of IT, New Belgium Brewing

The IT team at Nij Smellinghe Hospital deployed XC Series hyper-converged infrastructure and found more time to innovate and work on new projects.

NXN, formerly nexGen, is the trusted advisor and managed service provider to some of the most forward-thinking governments and enterprises worldwide..

“ Essentially we’re getting all the benefits of a SAN without the overhead of running it. ”

- Khaled Charif, Director of Technology, NXN

To ensure that its products are as fresh as possible when they reach consumers, Old Dutch invested in two Vblock 300 family platforms to run Oracle’s JD Edwards Enterprise One ERP, and Oracle Essbase for business intelligence. They built a second data center as a co-location for backup and recovery using Avamar and Recoverpoint.

“ If we had an IT outage, our plants would come to a halt. Within hours, all inventories would have to be scrapped. That represents a significant amount of money. The two Vblock Systems allow our plants to stay up and running. ”

- Gary Bimson, Network Manager, Old Dutch Foods

The aging IT infrastructure at Palmer College required constant maintenance and staff attention. Performance was poor, and user complaints were frequent. Their move to VxBlock converged infrastructure has not only resolved all performance issues, but it has also freed staff to focus on future movement to cloud based services and strategic engagement to add services and advance college business..

“ Time is our biggest benefit. We have an extensive list of projects, and now my team has the time and flexibility to work strategically - to prepare for our future. That's what IT should be about. ”

- Mark Wiseley – Senior Director of IT, Palmer College

Dell EMC Converged Platforms help ProMedica roll out its Epic EHR and improve patient care while efficiently supporting growth.

“ IT used to be viewed solely as a cost center and support partner. Now, thanks to Dell EMC Vblock® Systems, no project happens without us being involved early in the design and implementation. We’re delivering real value to the business. ”

- Anshul Pande, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, ProMedica

Queen Margaret University gives students a first-class digital experience and drives innovation through hyper-converged IT.

“I’m not only thinking of what today’s customers want, but what customers will be expecting in five years’ time. It’s easy to see how businesscritical our Dell EMC HCI will be. ”

- Scott Kerr, Head of Information & Learning Services, Queen Margaret University

Recently Formula One® required all teams to re-engineer their race cars to adapt to dramatic changes in performance, safety and fuel efficiency specifications. Recognizing this challenge also represented a tremendous opportunity to leap ahead of the competition, Renault Sport Formula One marshaled resources across the entire organization, including IT. With limited staff and budgets, IT needed a solution that would help race car engineering meet these new requirements and handle vast increases in Big Data generated by more sophisticated cars. The answer: a refreshed and re-engineered IT infrastructure with VCE Vblock® Systems as the foundation of a private cloud. The result of the converged infrastructure has been dramatically higher performance – capacity, scalability, availability, manageability, and, of course, speed.

“ Recognizing this challenge also represented a tremendous opportunity to leap ahead of the competition, Renault Sport Formula One marshaled resources across the entire organization, including IT. ”

- Thomas Mayer, COO, Renault Sport Formula One

Rent-A-Center moved to a hyper-converged infrastructure with the All-Flash Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, resulting in increased agility and performance to support growth and less time spent on administration.

“Typically, in a VDI environment, IOPS is your biggest concern. With the All-Flash Dell EMC VxRail Appliance, worry about maxing out our infrastructure has vanished.”

- Mike Conroy, Director of Technical Operations, Rent-A-Center

SDMI consolidates its technology environment and cuts costs while improving service quality for patients and doctors.

The VxBlock System 1000 is a converged system that fully integrates best-of-breed technologies from Dell EMC, Cisco and VMware to provide one of the fastest ways to modernize and simplify your IT infrastructure.

The State of Louisiana is migrating their legacy IT environment to hyper-converged infrastructure with XC Series powered by Nutanix.

Japanese hospital accelerates analysis and research. Read about how Teikyo University Hospital improves patient healthcare with a modular platform that boosts the effectiveness of IT with faster provisioning.

“We can store everything in our Dell XC web-scale modular appliances and share the data between systems. We have increased performance, and we have cut costs down by one-third. ”

- Dr. Tomohiro Sawa, Medical Information Systems Research Center, Teikyo University Hospital

In a highly regulated industry where any outages carry high penalties, TÜRKKEP uses Vblock® Systems with VCE™ Technology Extension for EMC® Isilon® to offer secure, reliable services to its customers to ensure compliance with local and international standards.

“Time-to-deployment was 5 times faster with VCE compared to what we’d seen with other solutions. ”

- Anshul Pande, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, ProMedica

The Tyler Independent School District was caught in the financial vice of having thousands of old computers, which were in desperate need of replacement, while losing significant state education funding. A Vblock System running Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) software from VMware offered the district a new path forward.

“I hear from my engineering group regularly about how happy they are with the Vblock, how easy it is to work with, and how well it works. ”

- John Orbaugh, Director of Technology, Tyler Independent School District

Uganda Revenue Authority improves productivity and makes revenue collection more certain with agile VCE solution. URA employees work more effectively and efficiently - performance has improved by as much as 60 percent, while user satisfaction has doubled with uptime moving toward 100 percent.

“With fewer parts and a converged infrastructure, things are much easier to manage. We have saved money on cabling and can provision servers 80 percent faster than before. ”

- James Kizza, Assistant Commissioner, IT Corporate Services, Uganda Revenue Authority

The deployment of Vblock 340 with EMC VNX storage, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blades, Cisco Nexus switches, and VMware vSphere virtualization was an obvious choice for Unilin whose global success is built on continuous innovation, investing in design, research & development and the latest technologies. Benefit: Delivered an agile, high-performing data center platform to boost application performance, virtualization and scalability, translating into higher productivity and a better user experience for both employees and customers.

“When we analyzed the investment the cost differential was very small over a three-to-four year period. But Vblock Systems had many extra benefits like the fact that it was a revalidated product from a single vendor, which would save overheads and make us more efficient. ”

- Jo Desplenter, Infrastructure Solutions Team Manager, Unilin

With Vblock Systems, researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania capture social media insights from big data analysis.

“ Our faculty and students conduct research that demands huge IT resources. With Vblock Systems, we're meeting our big data research needs quickly and efficiently. We also can deliver resources on the fly, which is essential to serving the constantly changing world of communication research. ”

— Tejash Patel, Senior Director, Information Technology Services, School of Nursing (formerly IT Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Services, Annenberg School for Communication), University of Pennsylvania

With the implementation of its new VxBlock System and VxRail Appliance, USD is enjoying additional benefits that include easily connecting to any public cloud or another private cloud to create innovative hybrid cloud solutions and freeing the ITS team to focus on innovation and value, rather than on simply keeping the lights on.

“Dell EMC listens and responds, and gives us better solutions-month after month, year after year. USD is a world-class Higher Education Experience business supported by a world-class IT infrastructure-and Dell EMC is at the heart of that. ”

- Mike Somerville, NISS Manager - Systems Support & Chief Cloud Evangelist, University of San Diego

Innovative products combined with superior quality: that is what Vollrath Company brings to the table for the restaurant industry. Since bringing in Dell EMC, our system admins operate more as business analysts

“Every day used to be a firefight. Since bringing in Dell EMC, our system admins operate more as business analysts. They work on improving group policy and finding ways to make things more efficient.”

- John Sharp, The Vollrath Company

Wake Forest Baptist deployed three Vblock System models: Vblock 720, Vblock 540, and Vblock 340 to provide the infrastructure for its new software-defined data center, Wake Cloud. The environment has been designed to support not only the medical center’s upgrade to Epic 2014 EMR 2014, but also more than 750 other applications—from storing and offering access to the medical center’s imaging studies to supporting its Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure.

“Now, that I’m the CFO I like the Vblock environment even more. First of all it’s saving us on the maintenance and support funding. That allows us to take those remaining investment dollars and actually put them into new innovative investment. ”

- Chad Eckes, EVP and Chief Financial Officer

With Vblock Systems, Woolworths transformed IT from an organization bogged down with managing components to one focused on innovation and service delivery. A virtualized, converged infrastructure provides Woolworths with the performance, flexibility, and high availability so critical to a 24/7 retail operation.

“With the outstanding reliability of Vblock Systems, customers get the same high-quality, consistent experience at Woolworths regardless of what time or where they shop. That’s critical to Woolworths maintaining a strong competitive advantage across Australia and New Zealand. ”

- Matt Chamley, Head of Infrastructure, Woolworths

An IT services provider in China achieves 31 percent business growth in one month with cloud-based desktops running on XC Series hyper-converged infrastructure.

“In one month, our business has improved 31 percent. We have nearly 100 cloud desktop terminals serving online, and employees from across multiple departments are responding well. We’ve started to promote the Dell VDI solution in the market, hoping to create value for customers through cloud desktop services since we’ve seen how good the results are. ”

- Huang Zhiqing, Project Manager, Zhongtong Information Service

Bumrungrad International Hospital embraces the digital future of healthcare with Dell EMC

City of Monheim innovative smart city through technology that inspires

EHL- Swiss Hospitality Management School improves access to data while removing the barriers to innovation by modernizing its IT with Dell EMC VxRail

Forest Hills Public Schools Distric provides a secure and reliable network through parternship with Dell

KFC Singapore transforms its IT operation and delivers data 58 percent faster to personell

London South Bank University improves student IT experiences with increasing satisfaction rates 25% by migrating from a hybrid cloud solution

Middlesbrough Council improving digital services for citizens

Neumann University network gets high marks from students for flawless performance

The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (UTIA) enables a more reliable, secure and easily managed wireless network with Dell EMC and Aerohive technologies

HCI and data protection modernize company's IT .

Transforming IT from edge to core to cloud.

Top scores for game-day experience.

Building the foundation for a Smart City.

VDI allows research to continue despite campus closure

Partnering with Dell for Azure Stack HCI and SQL

MetLife Korea enables greater digitization across the business with a fivefold to tenfold increase in processing speeds using Dell Technologies

New Belgium Brewing achieves superior system performance and actionable business intelligence by making IT more agile and efficient on a hyperconverged infrastructure

Animal Logic brings animated movies to life through the power of Dell Technologies

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center keeping critical patients safe and treated using SD-Wan

Info Edge (India) builds a network to drive innovation with Dell EMC software-defined networking solution

This case study tells how a school district cuts IT infrastructure by 83%, speeds performance by 87%, halves IT tickets, and scales to support thousands of additional concurrent VPN users—all with Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.