EMC and AOL use VPLEX to reduce complexity in migrations, eliminating downtime!

OMG! IT’S FINALLY HERE! Yea baby, you heard it here first! The VPLEX is a REALITY! But no, it’s not just vapor, and no, it’s not just ‘oh look an announcement’ what I’m really excited about is those who have actually been using it.   In particular, I’d like to showcase AOL who has used it, in this whitepaper – “AOL extends Virtual Storage to cloud computing with EMC VPLEX clusters” It’s pretty short, to the point but so succinct in the message it delivers.

Referencing a few quotes from this whitepaper really speaks volumes to the types of challenges we all face within the Enterprise space.

Stevens said, "We take disaster avoidance very seriously because the costs are so high if our systems aren’t available. Not only are there huge administrative costs and logistics involved with recovering hundreds of systems, but we risk losing customers forever if they can’t access our services."

That particular point is especially resonating – How many times have you lost a customer due to services being down, imagine if you can take that burden off the table from a storage stand point, that’s particularly cool if you ask me (not to mention being able to actually set and meet a true 5-9’s Forever SLA)

Stevens explained, "Because there is no downtime with migrations, we don’t need to devote huge amounts of time coordinating with application owners, database administrators and system administrators, and even our external customers. The actual migration itself is much less complex for our storage administrators."

"We’re no longer delaying migrations to avoid disrupting a peak load cycle.  So we’re returning our systems before the lease expires and not getting hit with high fees."

I’m not sure how many of you have to deal with regular lease cycles, even when you OWN the equipment scrap the leasing… dealing with the maintenance burden and moving data and equipment around non-disruptively in order to meet the needs of your application owners and the business without the hellacious burden of downtime windows managing apps unique SLA requirements.

And to think, in the use case and example above – This is something any customer can do TODAY by leveraging VPLEX, and that just opens the doors to extending your datacenter across geographic boundaries and the infinite number of other really cool things that the VPLEX will offer.

I’m glad such a renowned organization like AOL was able to be a part of this from the beginning, not only to provide this blog post I’d be able to share with you, but especially to be able to solve real world challenges today by using the technology of the future (Available now! :))