Finnish theme park opts for EMC unified storage

Moomin World in Finland has deployed a storage solution from EMC to manage park information. The theme park is using EMC VNXe unified storage system to improve the efficiency and scalability of, as well as access to, its business-critical applications in a VMware virtualized environment. Moomin World expects the new system to lower costs, risk and management complexity.

According to EMC, VNXe’s application-aware unified storage system will help the theme park optimize data storage, quickly create storage for virtual machines and automate its tiered storage requirements. The virtualized environment leverages VMware vSphere management capabilities, together with built-in EMC VNXe wizards and EMC Unisphere management software. Jarkko Kuitunen, IT systems manager at Moomin World, says, “With EMC VNXe, our business has reaped the benefits of a solution that previously only the biggest companies could afford: a virtualized, tiered, unified data storage environment. The exceptional capabilities of the solution have not only solved our immediate problems of reliability and availability, but have also improved productivity, and provided us with a platform that can scale to support future growth. It is very simple to manage, and I don't have to be a data storage specialist to achieve the results the business demands."

Before implementing the new system, Moomin World’s IT and storage environment was struggling to keep pace with the theme park’s continued success. Its data was growing exponentially, and there was an increased risk of downtime. Business-critical services--such as electronic point of sale, Microsoft SharePoint and financial solutions--were hosted on servers nearing their end of life.

Now, Kuitunen says, "To manage the solution, I simply open a console on my desktop. I can instantly see if something is wrong without having to go to the server room. If I want to make a new volume, change the configuration, or allow systems access to new PCs, it is just a matter of tweaking the system. Today I can focus my time on creating business value rather than managing the data storage solution."