Hopkinton, Mass.-Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Mark Farnsworth, Director of Information Technology for Richmond, Va.-based Timmons Group, said, "As a civil engineering firm, we generate enormous GIS mapping files from real-time photography and 3-D virtual models for everything from utility poles to storm drains and underground pipelines. A single project often requires 500 megabytes of data. Our EMC information infrastructure enables us store our data more intelligently to deliver targeted levels of performance and reliability to both our data-intensive applications and less demanding test and administrative environments. Because of this, we've achieved enormous cost savings."

Timmons Group initially replaced its HP storage area network (SAN) with an EMC CLARiiON® SAN. As projects continued increasing in size and complexity, Timmons migrated to a dual-protocol EMC CLARiiON CX3-20 UltraScale™ FC/iSCSI system, which features combined fibre channel and iSCSI connectivity in a single storage array to give customers the flexibility to easily and cost-effectively consolidate information from and between disparate networks.

"EMC allows us to continue using our existing hardware and extend the life of our HBA investment while attaching more servers to our back-end SAN," said Bryan Moore, IT Infrastructure Manager for Timmons Group. "By using the EMC CLARiiON CX3-20's fibre channel connectivity for our large-scale application files and Oracle 10G and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases, we avoid bottlenecks when pulling that data over the local area network. Our development environment is less demanding, so we use the CLARiiON's iSCSI connectivity to provide a staging area for developing and testing code, as well as to house email, Word documents, .pdf files and other departmental data such as RFPs and scope of work."

While optimizing performance and reducing the cost of ownership for data storage has been a major factor in utilizing the EMC information infrastructure solution, the flexibility, scalability and ability to leverage their existing IT investment have given Timmons Group a competitive edge.

"With EMC, we can house multiple virtual servers and develop and test our applications on the fly," commented Moore. "The costs savings are enormous, especially since it gives us the flexibility to handle whatever environments our clients might have in the future without deploying additional servers. As a result, we're able to reach out to a much broader client market."

Timmons also has achieved cost savings with the EMC Celerra® networked attached storage gateway connected to the CLARiiON CX3-20. By storing its critical information, such Microsoft Exchange email on Celerra, Timmons has been able to consolidate from four files servers down to one, freeing several thousand dollars worth of hardware to be redeployed elsewhere in the company. Because of the excellent performance of CLARiiON iSCSI connection to the Celerra, Timmons will continue to use the gateway solution to support Exchange 2007 as it migrates toward that environment.

As part of its next generation backup strategy, Timmons Group also implemented the latest version of EMC Replication Manager™ software to facilitate faster backup and recovery processes.

"It used to take us 16 hours to clone our SQL Server 2005 databases to a backup server and then backup that data to tape for offsite storage," Moore explained. "This severely impacted system performance during the busy work day. With EMC Replication Manager, we've narrowed that backup window by over 250 percent. Now we clone our entire 1.5 terabytes of data and back up to tape in about six hours. So we're no longer running out of nighttime hours. More importantly, we are able to more quickly and easily recover our business-critical information."

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, CLARiiON and Celerra are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. Replication Manager and UltraScale are trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.