EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Sanofi, a global pharmaceutical company, has implemented EMC® VPLEX® virtual storage technology to transform Sanofi’s IT environment by consolidating 26 data centers to only three and migrate 4,000 applications in order to increase the utilization, efficiency and agility of its IT environment so that information can easily be shared, accessed and moved within, across and between its data centers.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Utilization—VPLEX has enabled Sanofi to improve storage utilization by up to 30%.
• Better Business Agility—More than 200 applications out of 4,000 have already been migrated to three new global data centers, avoiding 24 hours of downtime to date and accelerating Sanofi’s massive IT consolidation plan.
• Cost Savings—Sanofi expects to reduce operating costs after the migration of its 4,000 applications is complete.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

As a result of a major acquisition and steady business growth, Sanofi was struggling to manage its geographically dispersed IT infrastructure that spanned 26 separate sites around the world. Additionally, Sanofi’s employees were finding it increasingly difficult to access and share data—a capability that is critical to advancing Sanofi’s pharmaceutical research, regulatory approvals and product distribution.

Sanofi implemented EMC VPLEX to migrate 4,000 applications to a centrally managed IT infrastructure while consolidating its sprawling 26 data centers to just three, now located in the US, France and Singapore. With more than 200 applications already migrated, Sanofi has achieved increased agility in its data center. The “Federated AccessAnywhere” technology inside VPLEX was a key enabler to achieving and expediting a truly massive IT consolidation—while avoiding any downtime of production systems. This migration and new ability to share, access and move information has significantly reduced Sanofi’s operating costs and improving business agility.

In just six months, EMC and systems integrator, Accenture, helped Sanofi build its new IT infrastructure, complete with three data centers that are now fully interconnected and operate as a global private cloud. Sanofi’s private cloud leverages VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions and EMC unified storage.

Customer Quotes:

Sebastian Roque, Storage Engineering Manager, Sanofi Group

“We are very pleased with VPLEX. We can perform migrations between our data centers extremely easily. In fact, we’ve migrated 200 applications to date to the new data centers without the 24 hours of downtime we would have endured with traditional migration methods. Our massive consolidation of 4,000 total applications would be impossible without VPLEX, and once completed, will have avoided us at least 2-3 weeks of downtime.”

“Our storage assets are shared as a single, centrally managed resource on our private cloud infrastructure, regardless of what data center they’re located in. Our storage utilization has improved by up to 30%, helping us to maximize the value of our investments while postponing future storage expenditures.”

“As part of our ongoing IT transformation, VPLEX will help us to deliver IT services to numerous business groups across Sanofi. We will reduce our operating costs and increase overall efficiency once our migration is complete. With these savings, we’ll be able to pour more IT resources into strategic projects that support our scientists and healthcare customers.”

“We chose EMC VPLEX because it allows us to create a robust IT environment with seamless management of our data regardless of where it resides. EMC’s extensive experience in the data center gave us the confidence that we would have the right technology to make this project a success.”

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VPLEX
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

Jen Boucher
508-249-6837
Jen.boucher@emc.com