Being a PC guy, it is not surprising that Ashok Kumar has a one-size-fits-all approach to enterprise storage that shows up time and time again. This is another great example of how he compounds his inability to understand the segmentation of the enterprise storage market by not even knowing the basics of high-end procurement:
A: A lot of the growth in the past few years came from easy customers. You had the ponytail guys making purchase decisions, and they are by definition the techno geeks who buy technology for technology's sake....
If you look at the traditional storage requirements of companies, they don't need SANs or some very complex installation. When people talk about companies needing hundreds of terabytes of storage, those are the exceptions, not the rule. People took the exception and made it the rule, and that added to oversupply.
A traditional company strategy....
ROI: Eastman executives have talked publicly about the company being a "full-blown e-business" by 2005. What exactly does that mean?
Buehler: The chemical industry is a very capital-intensive, product-centric, slow-growth industry and has been for several years. What Eastman is talking about with this statement is leveraging information technology. E-business is nothing more than the application of information technology to business. Our e-business strategy revolves around leveraging IT to bring a differentiated value proposition to our customers. The premise is that if we bring value to our customers, we'll bring value to our shareholders. Examples are ShipChem and Eastman.com. ShipChem is a new business, a new value proposition enabled by IT. Eastman.com is a customer services tool that is enabled by IT.
What it comes down to is we're trying to embrace IT aggressively to transform a company to a much more customer-focused, customer-driven culture vs. being a product- or asset-driven company. It's a transformation of focus revolving around IT.
computerworld.com
....and the strategic storage plan:
Eastman Chemical Adopts Strategic Data Storage Plan
Cuts downtime from days to minutes
By PIMM FOX
(July 17, 2001)
Eastman Chemical Inc. had long-standing plans to migrate from the mainframe version of SAP AG's R/3 enterprise resource planning software to the newer, distributed version. It also used the project as an opportunity to implement a strategic data storage plan. When Eastman, the Kingsport, Tenn.-based chemical giant with operations in 72 locations around the globe, was running the mainframe software, it kept backup copies of all its data on tape. If trouble hit, the IT department in Kingsport would go into disaster-recovery mode. This involved switching operations to another location to ring up the entire system on different hardware. "It took about 72 hours to do this," says Charlie Oliver, director of global computing and telecommunications services.
Eastman, which conducts a portion of sales and other business over the Internet, instead opted to move to a business continuance model. "We wanted simultaneous copies of our database in two locations along with a connection to our Fibre Channel," says Oliver. The result: Downtime has gone from days to minutes.
"In a business-to-business framework, being out of service for our customers and trading wasn't viable," Oliver says.
E-business has also required taking internal paper and voice information from a variety of business areas and making it accessible to trading partners electronically.
Departments such as engineering, finance, health, safety and administration all must digitize information. "More employee information is also being moved online to increase productivity," says Oliver. "That's what is driving the increased demand for storage capacity."
The move to R/3 also gave Eastman the impetus to look at the strategic value of storage.
From Kingsport, William Horton, Eastman's manager of enterprise computing services, is able to manage the new storage system from Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp. for his 1,000 servers, which are distributed throughout the world. He can also manage smaller storage requirements as they come online.
"Today, we have about 45TB in Kingsport, but I have sites around the world with similar functionality with just 1TB," says Horton, "I can manage and allocate resources from here."
With sister sites in Longview, Texas; Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Singapore, Horton wanted storage that would maintain availability regardless of geographic location and allow for central management.
"Deciding on a vendor was a complex decision because our IT organization is centralized," says Oliver. "We have one support place, and we don't have a lot of different technology based on one business unit."
Five technology groups were involved in the selection process: telco, enterprise distributed services, midrange computing, desktop services, and the applications and technology group. They put together the technology requirements for making the switch to R/3 and defined specific criteria for storage.
"We identified three or four different companies that had storage products that on the surface would meet our requirements," says Oliver.
Eastman invited representatives from storage companies to come in and explain their products, and after narrowing the field down, "we made visits to their manufacturing facilities," says Oliver.
Eastman rated the technical functions -- but not the prices -- of the vendors' offerings using a mathematical system. Oliver talked with other companies employing similar storage products. "Through negotiation, we got a competitive price from EMC," says Oliver, "which we thought was uncommon because, while their products are high quality, their prices were high, too." In fact Oliver says, he kept price issues from the IT groups that were evaluating the different storage solutions. "Knowing the price can skew the review process," says Oliver, "so we have the purchasing department deal with price and negotiations."
After two 30-minute negotiating sessions, Eastman and EMC had a deal.
"We have been migrating the SAP environment to EMC -- just the parallel copies -- and so far, EMC has helped us get over any glitches by supplying additional hardware as needed," says Horton.
"We used the change from SAP R/2 to R/3 to implement a strategic storage plan," says Oliver. Our requirements were growing, and the need to cut downtimes was crucial for us here at Eastman as well as for the customers and partners getting information electronically."
computerworld.com |
