Delphix Provides Corporate Express With 'Easy Button' for Database Provisioning, Refresh, and Data Recovery

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 9, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Delphix, the market-leading provider of database virtualization software, today announces that Corporate Express, a division of Staples, has successfully simplified its database infrastructure by implementing Delphix Server. In doing so, they have reduced their storage requirements more than 12:1, implemented an energy-efficient disaster recovery site that doubles as a pre-production environment, and created a self-service database provisioning service for internal developers to create databases on-demand. In July of this year, the company was awarded the Best Green IT Architecture award from iCMG as a result of its successful Delphix deployment.

Delphix applies the simplifying concept of virtualization to database infrastructure, turning structured data and its supporting infrastructure into software that operates in a fraction of the space, while preserving full functionality and performance.  "Delphix Server is a key part of our Concentrated IT Initiative, where we use modern technologies to get more while consuming less," said Chad Singleton, Infrastructure Specialist at Corporate Express. "This resulted in our Green IT win. Rather than have data recovery sites as just cost centers consuming energy, we are now using them to do double duty as pre-production environments that use significantly less energy. This strategy allows us to reduce energy consumption and infrastructure spending, and enables IT to better respond to business requests -- which helps drive the top line," Singleton added.

Over the past 15 years, Corporate Express has expanded its global operations on a very large scale, which at times has created growing pains for its IT department. The Australian division faced three key challenges deploying and managing all of the databases required to support new application requirements: 1) the time and complexity it took for provisioning copies of production databases; 2) the cost of storage; and 3) the resource intensive process of recovering production information in the event of outages or failures. There was also an initiative to further integrate SAP into the organization, which would require preparation for additional provisioning and backup demands.

"We started a trial of the product in November 2009, after downloading the software over the Internet," Singleton said. "From there it was easy to see the benefits that Delphix could provide in production. We investigated Delphix's performance, capacity, and usability -- and all were very straightforward. The interface is simple, and it gave us role-based access so we could provide self-service to developers."

Delphix Server helped Corporate Express solve the operational complexity and redundant infrastructure required to support production applications on databases. After implementing Delphix's solution, IT reduced storage requirements by more than 12:1 by virtualizing and consolidating databases. The solution provided complete, fully functional databases that operate with improved agility, manageability, and performance. Delphix Server has also reduced database provisioning and refresh times from days to minutes -- with zero additional impact to production systems.  

In addition to all these benefits, with Delphix's TimeFlow technology, Corporate Express can keep a window of changes for production databases that can be used for backup and disaster recovery. They now can recover information from any point in time instantaneously from TimeFlow, without having to restore the data to additional, external storage. "When we need to restore a database with Delphix, it always works, and it's a positive experience," added Singleton.

"Delphix is very important to our business," said Andrew Grech, Infrastructure & Operations Manager at Corporate Express. "There is a lot of investment around applications integrated with Oracle databases. This is mission critical."

About Delphix

Delphix is the market-leading provider of database virtualization solutions. Delphix software addresses the single largest source of inefficiency and inflexibility in the modern datacenter -- provisioning, managing, and refreshing databases for business-critical applications. Delphix founder and CEO, Jedidiah Yueh, was Founding CEO of Avamar, a pioneering de-duplication company acquired by EMC in 2006, which shipped a billion dollar product that continues to transform datacenters with more than 20,000 customers. The Delphix team developed Oracle database clustering (RAC), used in more than 30,000 Oracle deployments, pioneered data de-duplication with Avamar, and developed the virtualization product roadmap and strategy at VMware during its growth into a multi-billion dollar business. Delphix is located in Palo Alto, California, and is backed by Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. The Delphix Board of Directors includes founding board members for companies such as Oracle, Business Objects, Informatica, Riverbed, and Avamar.

SOURCE Delphix