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To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (19373)	3/12/2001 12:30:24 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24042

More VRTS expertise................Eaton Gets Storage-Network Help From Veritas Being an early adopter is hard. That isn't stopping Jeff Goldstein at Eaton Corp. from vacationing far from his wintry headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. He's in Fort Myers, Fla., this week because he and his team got some storage consulting from an unlikely source. Eaton's storage network is up and running securely and reliably this week, Goldstein says, thanks to help the $9 billion manufacturer is getting from Veritas Software Corp. The software vendor will unveil updates to its line of storage-network-management products. Goldstein is considering the storage products, and he already uses some Veritas software for things like backup and recovery. But it's Veritas' new SANPoint Consulting unit that let him get away. The software decision can wait. According to Goldstein, Eaton had the beginnings of storage virtualization (where information can flow throughout a network without being tied to any one hardware device) and backup and recovery going on a storage network early last year. "But then we dropped jobs during backup and recovery, and other jobs were getting multiple addresses when they were only supposed to have one," he says. "By summer, we weren't comfortable moving ahead anymore." The Eaton storage network encompasses technology from Brocade, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, StorageTek, and Sun. "The vendors don't play together like they should," says Goldstein, "and standards aren't developed yet." Veritas presented Eaton with three designs for its storage network, with the most expensive design coming with the highest levels of scalability and availability. Goldstein chose the middle package, and Veritas showed him how to create eight-port switches as hubs between servers, storage, and other back-end switches to improve scalability. The Veritas consultants also told him how to upgrade the Brocade switches to improve information availability. Most important, Veritas SANPoint consulting, according to Goldstein, let him cut some hardware costs in half. "And we can reduce the amount of our people who have to muck with the storage," says Goldstein, "by 30% to 40%." He says he plans to increase the 8-terabyte storage network to 16-terabytes by year's end. Eaton has spent $250,000 on storage-network hardware so far, and plans to spend $50,000 to $60,000 in additional hardware. Industry analyst Dennis Martin at Evaluator Group Inc. thinks that software-maker Veritas knows as much as any consulting company about storage networks and they have a big advantage because they're hardware independent. "I've seen the interoperability lab where they do all the testing," says Martin. "Veritas consulting is for real."