Thomson Speeds Development of Advanced TV Products With EMC Network-Attached Storage
EMC Celerra Provides Thomson Engineers with Dramatically Improved Availability of Mission-Critical NFS Data
HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 28, 1998-- EMC Corporation, the world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems, software and services, announced today that Thomson Consumer Electronics, number one in the U.S. in sales of televisions and VCRs under its RCA, GE, and ProScan brands, has implemented EMC's Celerra File Server to eliminate down time and improve manageability of their network file services. These services are necessary to share access to mission-critical information among engineering groups to support faster, more cost-effective development of home entertainment products.
''Thomson operates in a market where profit margins are narrow and competition is fierce,'' explained Charles Brombaugh, Manager of Design Automation. ''EMC Celerra helps us overcome these challenges by providing our product development engineers with quick, uniform access to the same data. The benefit is speedier, more efficient and more successful development of the products that drive our company's revenues.''
Thomson, based in Indianapolis, uses EMC Celerra File Servers to deliver data access services to 150 Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations running UNIX and Windows NT-based computer-aided design (CAD) applications.
''My chief challenge is making sure vital product development data is available to my engineers 24 hours a day, seven days a week,'' explained Jeffery Taylor, Thomson's Senior UNIX Systems Administrator. ''Without access to this data, the engineers -- who often work nights and weekends from remote locations -- can't do their jobs. When this happens, we not only lose $750,000 a day, but potentially miss out on a time to market advantage that can never be recovered.
''I used to spend my entire week working to keep our network file server from going down,'' Taylor continued. ''With Celerra, engineers have more time to design products and I can pursue pro-active solutions rather than constantly put out fires.''
Thomson has implemented Celerra's advanced administration tools to reduce the cost and complexity of managing increasing volumes of network file server (NFS) data. ''Since Celerra was installed, it takes one third the IT staff to manage our NFS environment even though the amount of storage has grown 10 fold,'' noted Brombaugh.
''Because data is centralized on Celerra, backups are much easier compared to individually backing up and restoring hundreds of computers,'' Brombaugh explained. ''This protects our data better since we can perform backups more consistently and frequently. We also reduce the risk of someone accidentally deleting important project files, which could represent months of lost work.''
Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels, commented, ''EMC Celerra has knocked down the roadblocks to information flow that have long been associated with traditional network file servers. EMC Celerra's unsurpassed availability, superior file management, and exceptionally high speeds enable Thomson and other successful companies to dramatically increase the value of their information by sharing it among people who are united by a common business goal or task. The result is reduced time to market of new products, higher profitability, and an overall improved competitive advantage.''
The EMC Celerra network attached storage solution is comprised of EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems, network file server software, and state-of-the-art information management capabilities. Thomson relies on six additional EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems for its mainframe-based material planning systems.
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 emc.com.
EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage and Celerra are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Contact:
EMC Corp.
Greg Eden
508-435-1000 x77195
eden_greg@emc.com |
