In addition to several more sightings of increased activity at the stealthy EMC Ventures (Invisible Worlds, Rioport, Integratus, DV2, Vertica, etc), I thought this glimpse into Home Depot's core/edge E-Infostructure was most interesting:
Home Depot is in the process of expanding from 980 stores to 1,900 stores globally over the next 3 years. After quelling a minor rebellion last year with some of its suppliers who were temporarily gripped by their own dotcom-induced disintermediation fantasies, HD is now in the process of opening an online "sales channel" with the now-pliant suppliers of its 50,000 product lines. Below is a snapshot of their current information system which is currently at 35 terabytes. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see how that can easily grow beyond 100 terabytes in just a few years especially when Home Depot starts using more multimedia in their online consumer education programs:
Home Depot, based in Atlanta, GA., relies on 35 terabytes of EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage to support its business-critical applications, including finance, merchandising, reporting, imaging, store support, customer service, file and print services as well as e-business. The Symmetrix systems provide consolidated storage to Home Depot's IBM mainframe systems, their Hewlett-Packard Unix and Windows NT systems, and their IBM Windows NT servers. Home Depot also uses EMC CLARiiON storage for distributed server applications running on Data General servers.
To maximize information availability, Home Depot uses EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software to provide a real-time mirrored copy of its information across two EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems should one experience a disruption. Home Depot also uses EMC TimeFinder software for real-time back ups, EMC ControlCenter software for flexibly and efficiently changing storage configurations on the fly, and EMC PowerPath software to provide load balancing across all available server paths.
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