General Mills Buys More Than 150 Terabytes of New EMC Symmetrix DMX Systems

Hopkinton, - February 03, 2003 -

EMC Corporation announced today that General Mills, the $10.8 billion supplier and marketer of the world's most trusted consumer food brands, has purchased more than 150 terabytes of EMC Symmetrix DMX™ series information storage systems, the first generation of the new Symmetrix Direct Matrix Architecture. General Mills chose EMC Symmetrix DMX systems to manage the growth of its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, one of the largest SAP implementations in the world. The Symmetrix DMX storage systems will expand General Mills' existing Symmetrix storage area network (SAN) and business continuity strategy.

Vandy Johnson, General Mills' Senior Director, Information Systems Operations, said, "The great strides Symmetrix DMX makes in performance and availability, along with an architecture to take us well into the future and complete software compatibility with our existing environment, make EMC's new high-end offering the right solution for General Mills. Ninety-seven percent of our business runs on SAP. We run SAP on Symmetrix networked storage because EMC is the standard for world-class SAP implementations."

"Our acquisition of Pillsbury really put EMC to the test," Johnson continued. "In one day, we doubled our SAP transactions, and EMC delivered subsecond response time without a hiccup. No other storage system could have done that, in our opinion. The dramatic growth of our combined businesses now demands ever-higher levels of performance, scalability and data availability that only Symmetrix DMX offers. The Direct Matrix Architecture will give us consistent, peak performance in all conditions, even during 'bursts' of online transactions that can be common in SAP environments."

The Symmetrix DMX2000 systems will provide consolidated networked storage to General Mills' SAP R/3 applications, including materials management, production planning, financials, business intelligence, human resources, general ledger, customer service, and sales and distribution. SAP R/3 runs on General Mills' HP Superdome and HP N-Class UNIX servers and utilizes Oracle's database management software.

General Mills, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will implement Symmetrix DMX systems at its primary and disaster recovery data centers. Using EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software, General Mills will continue to mirror data between the two sites, but rather than have a dormant remote site, General Mills uses its backup center for application development, testing and other non-production activities. Implementing this productive protection strategy allows General Mills to lower its overall IT costs by improving information utilization.

"Two years ago, recovering from a disaster in five days might have been good enough," said Mike Meinz, Director, Information Technology at General Mills. "Since we've automated more of our operations with SAP and have watched downtime put companies out of business, we no longer feel that way. Today, if we have a major disabling event, we can recover our data and applications in less than 20 minutes because of EMC Symmetrix and EMC business continuity software. With Symmetrix DMX, we expect to speed-up data replication for disaster recovery and nondisruptive backups even more. Being able to generate data replicas more quickly will allow us to engage in faster, more cost-efficient application development and testing, upgrades, data migrations and reporting. The power of the Direct Matrix Architecture also will dramatically reduce the performance penalty that affects normal application processing in traditional business continuity environments."

In addition to the more than 150 terabytes of EMC Symmetrix DMX2000 storage systems, General Mills also purchased EMC's advanced business continuity and open management software, including the ControlCenter family of management software. Johnson said, "Because Symmetrix DMX software is the same advanced EMC software we run on our existing Symmetrix systems, we're able to greatly benefit from the training and experience that our IT staff already has with EMC."

David A. Donatelli, EMC Executive Vice President of Storage Platforms Operations, said, "As one of the largest SAP sites in the world, General Mills has set new standards for storage performance, scalability and flexibility as its successful brands and acquisition of new product lines have generated rapid revenue growth. General Mills is assured that the Symmetrix DMX series and future-generation EMC innovations will be there to support even greater success."

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing automated networked storage solutions for organizations across the globe. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com