Leading Midwest Utility Selects EMC Enterprise Storage Systems and Software; EMC Professional Services Speed Implementation of Strategic Technology Change

Business Wire, Feb 8, 1999

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 1999--EMC Corporation announced today that Indianapolis Power & Light Company (IPL), a leading Midwest electric utility, has selected EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems, software, and services to create a flexible information infrastructure and disaster recovery capability.

"Our industry will undergo a major change as customer choice becomes a widespread reality. In that environment, the efficient management of information will be become critically important," said Joseph A. Gustin, IPL's Vice President, Information Services. "Consolidating our storage gives us remarkable flexibility to handle change and growth without interrupting or slowing down delivery of service, and EMC's remote mirroring software gives us unprecedented disaster recovery capability."

To facilitate this consolidation, IPL has purchased Fibre Channel-based EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and a suite of EMC software solutions -- including Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), EMC TimeFinder, EMC PowerPath and Enterprise Storage Platform (ESP). IPL also is using EMC Professional Services and Symmetrix Data Migration Services (SDMS) to speed the integration of the EMC storage and software into its environment.

IPL is moving its mainframe-based financial applications to Sun servers and EMC Symmetrix storage systems running Oracle Financials applications and databases. IPL also is converting its mainframe storage to EMC systems, which will support service restoration and customer accounting, among other applications. When completed, two terabytes of mainframe and open storage will reside on EMC systems.

"We will soon migrate mission-critical applications from a mainframe environment to a Unix-based open system so we needed to make our information protection and recovery capabilities more robust than ever before," explained Scott Barker, IPL's Information Security and Disaster Recovery Manager.

IPL will implement EMC's SRDF software to remotely mirror production data from a primary data center to a remote disaster recovery site located ten miles away. At the remote site, EMC TimeFinder software will be used to create copies of the mirrored data while systems are in production, eliminating the need to bring down databases each night. As another layer of fault tolerance, EMC PowerPath software enables disabled servers to automatically switch to operational ones and provide more efficient load balancing across servers.

"EMC's high-availability storage systems in combination with its advanced software provide us with a standard method of data protection across our different platforms and applications. This approach simplifies our backup and recovery procedures and improves the likelihood of their successful implementation in both normal and emergency situations."

Leveraging EMC Expertise to Maximize Value of Storage Investment

IPL is working with EMC Professional Services to design and implement its EMC enterprise storage environment.

"We're also relying on SDMS to assist us with the migration of approximately 500 gigabytes of data without having to interrupt our business operations. SDMS will allow us to move the data much more quickly compared to traditional methods, which also would have increased the possibility for error."

"By standardizing on EMC Enterprise Storage, IPL gains a single view of information that can be leveraged by every business division and process in the organization," said Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels. "EMC's superior information sharing, management and protection capabilities are enabling leading companies to improve customer service, reduce financial risk, boost productivity, manage change -- all of which are essential requirements for long-term success in today's highly competitive business world."

EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage, protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate web site can be accessed at http://www.EMC.com.

EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage, SRDF, SDMS, TimeFinder, and PowerPath are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.