Leading Global Building Materials Company Leverages EMC Avamar Deduplication Backup Software to Consolidate Backup and Strengthen VMware and Remote Office Data Protection

HOPKINTON, Mass., Aug. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, announced that CEMEX, a global building materials company, has turned to EMC to improve its backup and data protection operations in Latin American countries by leveraging EMC(R) Global Services and EMC Avamar(R) deduplication backup software. As a result, CEMEX has been able to consolidate and centralize the backup of its VMware and physical environments in multiple countries back to its Global Data Center in Monterey, Mexico.

As a leading, global provider of cement, ready-mix concrete and related building materials in more than 50 countries, CEMEX required a backup infrastructure that complemented its innovative building industry solutions and efficiency initiatives that promote a sustainable future. With VMware as a critical component within its infrastructure, the company first looked to EMC to better manage and control its virtual backup environment.

Fulgencio Garza, CEMEX's Global Shared Service Manager, said, "Our VMware farm is composed of 15 ESX servers, running more than 200 virtual machines. While we have definitely achieved a number of benefits by consolidating our servers into a virtual environment -- like saving space, cooling and energy and licensing -- we found that we were having challenges meeting backup windows due to the limitations of LAN and SAN bandwidth, as well as the performance impact on other applications."

CEMEX's Global Shared Services Team staff and the EMC Global Services team worked together to assess the environment, design the appropriate solution based on the unique use case and generate guidance on how to perform backups. In addition to reviewing CEMEX backup processes in its VMware and remote office environment, EMC was able to point out that the company could optimize all the processes in its entire backup infrastructure -- both virtual and physical in its data center and remote offices.

Garza added, "The trio of people, process and technology was becoming an ever increasing challenge to meet our data protection requirements. We have a lot of remote locations that need to have a dedicated person perform backups, and by doing an analysis, we found that we invest a lot of time to manage the backups -- between managing the backups themselves and the tapes in every remote location -- totaling more than 4,000 cartridges a year."

Working with EMC Global Services, CEMEX deployed Avamar to deduplicate and backup data in both its virtual and physical environments across 59 sites in 9 different countries.