Dell, EMC storage partnership success continues across EMEA

Dell and EMC continue to build on the success of their strategic partnership in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), having witnessed increased demand for their standard-based storage solutions from customers throughout the region.

With a growing portfolio of customers ranging from the manufacturing and professional services industries to healthcare and local government, the wide appeal of the Dell | EMC solution is apparent.

The implementation of Dell | EMC storage solutions across EMEA has continued to grow year-on-year since the partnership was first formed nearly four years ago. The most recent customers opting for Dell | EMC storage solutions in EMEA include Atos Origin (Belgium), Buckinghamshire County Council (UK), Uelzena eG (Germany), Indevco (Lebanon), The Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (Netherlands) and Sint-Andriesziekenhuis (Belgium).

Brendan McAravey, Head of Enterprise at Dell South Africa, commented: "Dell`s strategic partnership with EMC is growing from strength to strength in EMEA. We have seen an increasing number of customers implementing our storage systems. The scalability of the solutions combined with high-performance and cost-effectiveness makes the Dell | EMC technology an ideal choice for many companies throughout EMEA."

Atos Origin is a Netherlands-based business and technology integrator that designs, builds and operates integrated IT solutions globally. The company wanted to tailor its global Next Generation Desktop (NGDT) solution, which helps companies reduce their operational costs and improve day-to-day efficiency, to better suit the needs of the Belgian marketplace. While its NGDT solution was well suited to its larger customers in a global market, it was not sufficiently targeted to the smaller businesses that are more prevalent in Belgium.

Atos Origin developed a new solution, Extended Next Generation Desktop (x-NGDT), based on Dell | EMC CX storage area network (SAN), Dell PowerEdge 6650 and 1750 servers and Dell PowerVault PV136T servers. Dell also provides Gold Premier Support on the Dell | EMC SAN.

Eric Vanbaelenberghe, Ambassador Consultant, Atos Origin, says: "The whole idea behind x-NGDT is to provide our customers with a cost-effective and reliable infrastructure which ensures their systems are available any time, any where. The technology we`ve chosen and the support offered by Dell ensures these goals are met."

Buckinghamshire County Council in the UK faced the challenge of building a resilient hardware platform powerful enough to support its new set of SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. In doing so, it aimed to maximise operational efficiency and improve the delivery of core services to the local community. In addition, the council needed to deploy a hardware infrastructure to support a new community portal.

Dell provided overall guidance on architecture design and delivered a Dell | EMC SAN solution plus 27 Dell PowerEdge servers and a Dell PowerVault tape library.

Richard Nelson, Group Manager - ICT services, Buckinghamshire County Council, comments: "We expect the volume of content on the new community site to increase dramatically over the coming months and years. The Dell | EMC hardware is powerful enough to support this growth. In addition, the hardware and software is scalable and secure enough to handle the pressures of large numbers of authors uploading content to the site."

Based in Germany, Uelzena eG produces specialist dry goods and part-baked products for the food industry, as well as butter fats for the baking and confectionery sectors. Uelzena eG wanted to reduce IT costs while improving performance and the company needed an infrastructure which would be scalable for the future with a low total cost of ownership, as well as high availability. A reliable and flexible IT infrastructure was necessary to support growth into new areas.

Dell and PSH IT Projekte Systeme Hosting GmbH (PSH) supported Uelzena eG`s migration of its SAP R/3 solution from a Unix environment to Windows 2000, powered by three Dell PowerEdge 4600 servers. All the servers are linked to Dell | EMC CX600 Storage Arrays for the external storage of data.

Bernd T"ager, Group IT Manager for Uelzena eG, says: "With this new infrastructure we have increased IT performance five-fold while halving operating costs. Dell has been an excellent strategic partner, with a thorough knowledge of our business."

Sint-Andriesziekenhuis, a leading Belgian hospital, needed to implement a cost-effective backup and storage solution that could run quickly and effectively. The existing system had reached its storage capacity and could no longer manage the volumes of data collected by the hospital. Enhanced access to critical medical data and improved processes across the hospital were required, as well as the necessity to be able to build on the technology in the future.

Dell provided project management services, ensuring smooth and rapid implementation of a backup SAN, which was later migrated to a full SAN. The installation included the Dell | EMC Brocade 16 Port FC2, a range of Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerVault 132T and 775N storage systems. Dell`s controlled deployment team (CDT) was responsible for installing the SAN.

Dirk De Smet, Project Manager, Sint-Andriesziekenhuis, comments: "We believe the Dell hardware provided one of the best price and performance available in the marketplace. This was critical because of the tight budgetary constraints we operate under."