Virtual Geek

VMware and Documentum eRoom - or "how EMC saved $1.5M"

I've noted before how EMC uses VMware widely - there are more than 3000 ESX servers in use in various places, so it's not uncommon to hear great stories about how we save money.  This one was a nice one.

The full EMC Documentum suite works great on VMware (you only can't virtualize the FAST index server - and that's because of a weird Microsoft thing that's getting resolved, but that's only one server of many).   EMC Documentum is really a broad set of stuff, one part of which is called eRoom, which is analagous to how most people use Sharepoint - document storage and collaboration.   FYI, we use both Sharepoint and EMC Documentum internally.

I was happy to hear we run the whole deal on VMware Infrastructure.   Read the write up if you want the details, but here are some highlights...

1) the usual CapEx reasons (more important these days than ever!)

"Eliminated additional $1.5 milliion from planned budget expenditures and reigned in ongoing hardware and associated costs"

2) the normal "hey look at all this unexpected operational flexibility upside" reasons

"...several fail-overs have already been handled by VMware - the entire process only took a few minutes and the eRoom users never noticed a disruption.   In the past, such a failover would have significantly impacted users and produced longer down times."

3) the always fun "wow - performance is good.   WOW - really good!".    Everyone always is worried about this, almost always incorrectly.   Higher utilization can also be expressed as higher efficiency, which for some workloads has an effect of getting MORE on the same hardware (i.e. in this case we could have more front-ends).

"the final performance results acheived were significantly greater than expected.  Users were both pleased and astounded with the increased performancel eRoom activities such as site access, opening stored content, and saving files, are now instantaneous.   Response delays have been eliminated, yet the virtual site configuration is nearly identical to the original physical hardware configuration."

In the end, this one says it all....

 

So... You aren't virtualizing application ______   because of.... ?

Wow - all I can say is THANK YOU.

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/ManualAutomation/2008/10/07/site-recovery-manager-is-a-hit

There's no better source of input than a customer's own voice.   You'll notice that we're not perfect - so you know he's sincere :-)

We are seeing great success with SRM and EMC - customers really like it.   There are gaps - to be sure - and I'm in Palo Alto right now and we're working furiously to continue to innnovate together (and yes, we're working on those things you've pointed out and more)

Virtual_JTW - thank you for being an EMC and VMware customer!