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To: Gus who wrote (85)	9/28/2000 3:40:01 AM
From: Gus	Respond to of 234

Here are some interesting excerpts from an Inrange white paper. *The Internet Economy* The Internet has changed everything, including Storage and HA SANs. Data that was presented as text is now presented as a streaming audio-video clip. The difference in storage requirements is two orders of magnitude (see chart below.) Multimedia is only one multiplier of Storage and HA SANs. More than 70% of today’s organizational data is managed data, meaning it resides in a relational database manage-ment system (RDBMS). E-commerce is RDBMS-based. Search engines, online-catalogs, business-to-business (B2B), customer relationship management (CRM), sales automation, and enterprise resources planning (ERP) are all RDBMS-based. What this means is that for every piece of information stored in the RDBMS raw database, there is a description in the Meta database about that data. The raw data is often normalized into multiple tables of the RDBMS, also increasing the Meta database. RDBMS is essentially a storage and HA SAN multiplier. Global, time-zone independent corporations and the Internet economy, both supporting mission-critical applications, have eliminated the "closed" sign. It has become a 7x24x365 world. This has eliminated even scheduled downtime. It is no longer possible to quiet an application to perform backups or maintenance. This puts enormous pressure on IT operations to dynamically protect the data, add storage, and do maintenance while operations continue unabated and without missing a beat. This has led most IT organizations to a standard of "five 9s" uptime (see diagram below). HA SANs can help them achieve that goal. *Increasing IT Productivity* In 1999 a Fortune 500 survey of CIOs was taken, asking about their most pressing issues for 2000. One common answer was their concern in being able to hire and retain enough resources to achieve their IT goals. In 1999 there was an average of 3 unfilled IT positions per organization. The CIOs expectations are that it will be even higher in 2000. This has led many organizations to look at new purchases and technologies, but only if they are workload neutral or better for the IT staff. *Storage Centralization and Consolidation* IT organizations are centralizing and consolidating storage to maximize their ability to manage it. HA SANs are designed specifically to help this process. By centralizing and consolidating storage, IT can significantly reduce the time it takes to: · Add storage · Allocate volumes · Backup, archive, replicate, or mirror the data · Recover data or files · Manage the storage · Troubleshoot and repair problems Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 have publicly stated that they have either consolidated their storage or are in the process of doing so. The Unacceptably High Cost of Downtime The cost of downtime can often be very expensive, even disastrous. The table below reflects industry averages in 1998, the last year the data was compiled. Expect the costs to be significantly higher today. Industry Avg Loss/Hour Brokerage Operations $ 6,450,000 Credit Card Authorizations $ 2,600,000 E-commerce $ 240,000 Package Shipping Services $ 150,250 Home Shopping Channels $ 113,750 Catalog Sales Center $ 90,000 Airline Reservation Center $ 89,500 Cellular Service Activation $ 41,000 ATM Service Fees $ 14,500 Direct losses are only part of the costs to downtime. On June 12, 1999, eBay had an outage that lasted 22 hours. The direct cost of the outage was approximately $5 million. The indirect costs were approximately a 26% reduction in eBay’s stock price and market capitalization equaling more than $5 billion. On April 13, 1998, AT&T had an outage that lasted from 6 to 26 hours. The direct costs were in the tens of millions of dollars. In addition, AT&T had to provide $40 million in rebates and file SLAs with the FCC. inrange.com