HP Eases Storage Management, Increases Flexibility for $1.5 Billion Company; Maritz Chooses HP StorageWorks EVA to Consolidate Storage, Gain Efficiency
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 21, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- HP (HPQ) today announced that the Maritz family of companies has implemented the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array as part of a strategic consolidation plan for its growing information technology (IT) infrastructure.
Maritz, the largest source of performance improvement, travel and marketing research services in the world, has already been positively impacted with increased data center floor space and significantly reduced storage management time.
The company's two-year plan to standardize infrastructure services globally is focused on expense control and improving efficiency, responsiveness and flexibility. The HP StorageWorks EVA met the requirements and is helping Maritz easily and efficiently use and manage its storage environment.
"One of Maritz' big challenges in serving our diverse business interests is to track and control costs," said Rich Brockland, manager of technical services, within the Maritz Global Technology Services (MGTS) organization. "We are a cost center and therefore charge back all of our costs. StorageWorks helped us reduce storage management time up to 80 percent, giving us savings that we are able to pass along to our customers."
MGTS needed the EVA to accommodate continued growth of applications and services required by the $1.5 billion company, which provides market research, communications, learning solutions, incentives, event management, awards and recognition, travel and customer loyalty programs. MGTS installed an EVA combining high-performance, high-capacity RAID storage with a user-friendly browser-like control system. The EVA has reduced IT management time and provides the higher storage density, reliability and capabilities the company needs to manage its operation.
The firm's vast IT operations span its 10-building, 250-acre headquarters in Fenton, Missouri, in addition to 130 remote sites, including two data centers on the main campus which house nearly 600 HP ProLiant servers. The centers also rely on numerous UNIX(R) servers, including HP 3000 and e3000 servers running HP-UX and MPE/iX. The substantial hardware, software and services acquired from HP have delivered optimal efficiency to Maritz' operations.
"The virtualization features of the EVA allow us to easily add new servers and applications and not worry about how the storage is allocated," added Brockland. "And the Virtual Controller Software enables our technicians to expand virtual disk capacity on-the-fly without application downtime." |
