EMC Corporation Helps the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Reduce IT Costs, Improve Application Performance

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company and its technology partner, Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (NYSE: ACS), have improved the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the rapidly growing ScottsMiracle-Gro information infrastructure by implementing a centralized EMC® archiving solution.

In an era where digital information is growing, ScottsMiracle-Gro has reduced the amount of information it manages. In addition to reducing backup times, Scotts Miracle-Gro has increased application performance and furthered its compliance with corporate and government-mandated regulations.

Bill Waszak, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, said, “Our global workforce depends on fast and reliable access to business-critical enterprise applications such as SAP and Microsoft Exchange, as well as file services for everyday productivity. As our volume of information has grown on these systems, we faced increased challenges to deliver acceptable application performance, address lengthening data backup cycles and stem rising administrative costs.”

Working with ACS, which hosts and manages the ScottsMiracle-Gro information infrastructure, ScottsMiracle-Gro evaluated a variety of archiving options and chose EMC to automatically move information from production applications to an EMC archive storage system in the company’s primary data center.

“Partnering with ACS and EMC has been a win-win for both our business users and IT organization,” said Waszak. “We’ve been able to free valuable production resources to enhance productivity, reduce costs and ensure regulatory compliance, which ultimately strengthens our competitive position.”

Tom Gibson of ACS New Business Development, said, “The EMC archiving solution enabled us to offload more than three terabytes of information from their production environment. That allowed us to reduce backup windows by approximately 30 percent and extend the life of our client’s production storage environment. This not only saves a tremendous amount of staff time, it enables more rapid recovery in the event of a problem, even as the volume of information continues to grow.”

Automated archiving reduces production storage needs, streamlines compliance
The fastest-growing applications within ScottsMiracle-Gro are the SAP Business Suite, which is stored on EMC Symmetrix® DMX storage, Microsoft Exchange messaging, which resides on EMC CLARiiON® storage, and shared file services running on EMC Celerra® network-attached storage. All three applications are archived to a primary EMC Centera® system and then replicated to a remote ACS data center for disaster recovery.

In the company’s Microsoft Exchange environment, effective regulatory compliance was a primary concern. To address this issue, EMC EmailXtender® software is used to archive older Exchange emails for long-term retention as required by Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. ScottsMiracle-Gro implemented EMC DiskXtender® for NAS, which automatically migrates inactive files from Celerra to the centralized Centera archive, and then retrieves archived files seamlessly by a business user. Within the first three weeks, archiving freed more than one terabyte of space in the NAS environment.

Waszak said, “EMC and ACS provided the software and systems that enabled us to optimize our information infrastructure. By automatically moving information across storage tiers, we can deliver the right information where and when it is needed to serve our customers, maintain compliance, and reduce costs.”

The following benefits were recognized as a result of the collective strategy between EMC, ACS and ScottsMiracle-Gro:

* 25 percent reduction in backup windows in the SAP environment
* 40 percent reduction of the Microsoft Exchange data environment
* Reduced backup windows from 16 hours to six hours in the Microsoft Exchange data environment
* Recovered 1 TB in freed space in the NAS environment in three weeks
* Recovered 3 TBs of space from production by moving it to archiving environment

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.
For more on EMC news, events, and recent media coverage visit the news section of EMC.com. Note to editors: For further information about this release contact EMC Public Relations at pr@emc.com
EMC, Celerra, Centera, CLARiiON, DiskXtender, EmailXtender and Symmetrix are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.




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EMC Corporation
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