The University of Texas at El Paso Earns High Marks Lowers Costs and Increases Data Availability with EMC

Hopkinton, - April 27, 2005 -

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, announced today that the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) has achieved major financial and business benefits through its implementation of an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy based on EMC storage systems, software and services. The UTEP evaluated numerous storage providers, such as Network Appliance and Snap Appliance, but chose to centralize its storage with EMC. As a result, the UTEP has been able to manage the dramatic growth in student and faculty information and e-mail; increase uptime from 90 to 99 percent; reduce the number of servers by 10 percent; and lower storage management costs.

Kenneth Pierce, UTEP's executive director of Information Technology, said, "As our student and faculty populations have grown, we've experienced dramatic increases in the volume of student records, academic documents and e-mail files which must be readily available online. Previously, our dispersed storage environment could not keep up with this expansion and we experienced unacceptable downtime and rising data management costs. To reverse this, we began working with EMC to build an ILM foundation that consolidates information across multiple tiers of EMC storage and takes advantage of EMC's advanced software capabilities."

Working with EMC Services to design an ILM strategy, UTEP implemented a multi-tiered networked storage infrastructure, comprising EMC storage software and systems, and helped speed the implementation. The UTEP's Faculty and Student Storage solution uses an EMC CLARiiON^® storage area network (SAN) that is integrated with an EMC NS702G network-attached storage (NAS) gateway for student and faculty files.

"The EMC NAS gateway allows us to centrally manage our NAS and SAN environments inside the same CLARiiON system," said Pierce. "We achieve greater economies of scale and lower our server and storage acquisition costs. Also, by consolidating our NAS servers into a single gateway, the entire environment has become much easier to manage and more reliable."

The UTEP also uses an EMC Symmetrix® networked storage system to meet the demanding service level requirements of its student information system, and Oracle and Microsoft Exchange e-mail applications. To maximize the benefits of ILM, UTEP utilizes EMC ControlCenter® and EMC PowerPath® software to centrally manage, monitor, report on, and control the flow of information across their SAN and NAS storage resources and devices.

"We use EMC ControlCenter to manage all of our storage whether it resides on Symmetrix, CLARiiON or the NAS gateway," said Pierce. "ControlCenter is the eyes and ears of our storage infrastructure and helps monitor storage space, performance and usage to alert us if we're running too close to any thresholds. We also use it to report on how our storage is allocated across applications, allowing us to intelligently plan for and make storage purchases when we truly need them."

In addition, the UTEP uses CLARiiON to store 27,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and images of student records, and relies on CLARiiON ATA storage and EMC business continuance software, such as EMC TimeFinder®, EMC Replication Manager and EMC SnapView™ to backup older, less critical data.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.