DEVELOPER TOOLS

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, announced today that CompUSA has implemented the EMC ControlCenter family of integrated storage management software to simplify administration, improve utilization and lower management costs for its extensive storage infrastructure. ControlCenter, the world's leading storage resource management (SRM) software, provides a key component for enabling information lifecycle management (ILM) with its powerful capabilities to monitor, report, plan and provision storage across tiered, multi-vendor environments. Sid Walton, Director of IT Technical Services at CompUSA, one of the nation's leading retailers and resellers of technology products and services, said, "EMC ControlCenter has had a major impact on our operations. It's enabled us to increase application uptime and rapidly implement changes as our business evolves. With ControlCenter, we've dramatically reduced the hours we used to spend scripting and reporting, and we're much better equipped to troubleshoot, isolate and resolve performance issues." Prior to implementing ControlCenter, CompUSA relied on command line scripting for managing its SANs, which was time-consuming, personnel-intensive and difficult for visualizing the physical data and environment. ControlCenter allows CompUSA to design, plan and provision the infrastructure, and configure and optimize their storage devices. Additionally, ControlCenter's comprehensive monitoring and reporting capabilities enable CompUSA to assess growth, usage and performance, which is essential for proactively identifying performance issues and reallocating storage before the problem impacts a business-critical application. "It used to take us three days to run reports on our storage resource utilization and allocation because of all the scripting involved," Walton added. "EMC ControlCenter eliminated the scripting and enables us to run the same reports in minutes." ControlCenter also provides the visibility and flexibility needed to quickly set up new environments or expand existing ones to accommodate evolving business needs. For instance, CompUSA had to set up a UNIX-based training environment in a very short period of time. ControlCenter enabled IT to quickly reconfigure storage using the same hardware with minimal personnel resources. "We researched numerous solutions," said Walton. "Each company offered capabilities in one area or another, but EMC rose above them all with the most compelling breadth and depth of technology. EMC has a strong reputation for delivering top-grade solutions and the company's knowledgeable support staff was proactive in understanding our needs and growth, which made the process easier." To protect and recover data and reduce maintenance windows associated with its critical business applications, CompUSA also benefits from other EMC software. CompUSA uses EMC TimeFinder to replicate mirror images of active production Business Continuance Volumes (BCVs) and EMC PowerPath, which provides automatic load balancing, path failover, logical volume management and volume mobility capabilities.