Luminex Slims Down Infrastructure With EMC And VMware

HOPKINTON, Mass., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) , the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Luminex Corporation, a leading developer of biological testing for the life sciences industry, has implemented EMC and VMware solutions to reduce information infrastructure costs and improve business continuity.

James Zabawa, Director of Information Technology, Luminex, said, "Growing demand for our biological testing technologies has spurred a significant expansion of our information infrastructure. Our IT costs were growing and it was becoming more difficult to find space in our datacenter for new systems. With EMC and VMware, we achieved efficiency gains across the board and we're using fewer servers and consuming less storage, which saves us money in capital investment, maintenance and power usage. Additionally, with the centralized environment and advanced software, it's easier and less labor-intensive to manage and protect our data. We also reclaimed space in our datacenter, allowing us to postpone an expansion. If we had not consolidated onto EMC, our server expenditures alone would have exceeded our investment in EMC and VMware."

EMC Global Services designed and implemented the EMC and VMware infrastructure. Luminex applications, including Oracle enterprise resource planning, finance, Microsoft Exchange, internal ticketing and file serving are stored on an EMC CLARiiON CX3-20 storage area network (SAN). The company uses EMC DiskXtender?? software to archive files stored on CLARiiON to an EMC Centera content-addressed storage system reducing the cost of their primary storage. For data protection, Luminex leverages EMC Avamar deduplication backup software to realize significant cost savings and reduced backup windows. Using EMC RecoverPoint replication software, Luminex replicates VMware data on CLARiiON storage arrays from its Austin datacenter to its Toronto site to achieve the right recovery point and recovery time objectives.

"Downtime is not acceptable because we have orders, shipping, finance, manufacturing and field support all flowing through infrastructure 24x7," said Zabawa. "With RecoverPoint and VMware, we could experience a major datacenter failure and bring everything back up in minutes at our remote site 2,500 miles away. Adding in Avamar as our backup, we've also increased our ability to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations and audits because we can prove our data are available and safe."

To address growing backup windows and rising tape and disk costs, Austin-Texas-based Luminex replaced Symantec Backup Exec software and an automatic tape library with an EMC Avamar solution for source-based data deduplication and backup to remote offices and their datacenter.