Storage:

Russ Berrie Speeds Design and Cuts Costs with EMC CLARiiON

EMC Corporation announced that Russ Berrie and Company Inc, designer and developer of teddy bears and other gift products, has consolidated its product design, inventory management, sales and financial information onto an EMC CLARiiON Storage Area Network (SAN). The new EMC infrastructure will allow Russ Berrie employees and vendors to share information more easily and reliably, speeding and reducing costs of product design, sales and distribution.

Bill Caproni, Russ Berrie's Director of Information Technology, said, "Our goal is to achieve global collaboration of product design, which requires seamless information sharing among our employees across the globe who are involved in designing all features of our products. Consolidating our information onto an EMC CLARiiON SAN is dramatically increasing the value of our information by making it more accessible and manageable. The result is new products hit the market more quickly and development costs are lower."

Russ Berrie's EMC SAN is based on EMC CLARiiON FC4700 storage systems and Fibre Channel switches, which provide centralized storage to Sun Solaris, Compaq ProLiant Windows 2000, and HP 9000/UX servers. EMC Global Service's extensive knowledge of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, networked storage and HP environments allowed EMC to design and implement the CLARiiON SAN in only two weeks. The company chose the EMC CLARiiON SAN over the competition because of its proven software, openness and extensive customer service and support.

"EMC CLARiiON offers extensive interoperability with our other products - whether they are servers, third-party software or networking equipment. This made our initial CLARiiON implementation much simpler and gave us confidence we will be able to incorporate new technologies down the road," said Caproni. The EMC CLARiiON is central to Russ Berrie's rollout of new applications such as Web-based product development, PkMS data warehousing and J.D. Edwards OneWorld ERP applications for shipping, distribution, inventory and product management, sales and accounting. Russ Berrie also is consolidating existing applications -- including Web-based sales support and data warehousing -- onto the CLARiiON SAN.

Based in Oakland, N.J., Russ Berrie uses a range of software available for EMC CLARiiON, including SnapView, Access Logix and Navisphere Manager, to simplify data management and improve information availability.

"The fact that EMC software has provided measurable benefits in real-world customer environments is important," said Caproni. "Our information is too valuable to risk on software that might not work or delay important projects. EMC's SnapView software, for example, is helping make our information accessible 24x7 by allowing us to create real-time pictures of our databases for back up and recovery.

Joel Schwartz, EMC senior vice president and General Manager, CLARiiON Systems Division, said, "EMC CLARiiON is a popular choice for companies wishing to combine lower operational costs, 24x7 data availability, and simplified information management into a single solution. Russ Berrie selected CLARiiON to meet its demands for ultimate flexibility and reliability as it launches advanced information-intensive applications."

EMC Corporation is a world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.emc.com.

Contact EMC Corporation, Anne Pace, 508-293-7932, pace--anne@emc.com.