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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gus who wrote (3916)	8/26/2001 12:50:23 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Gus, Here is a piece about what one comapny did and it supports your post on high-end/lowend markets..and they made these changes in these hard times... La-Z-Boy Plans Server Swap By DAVID LEWI While La-Z-Boy Inc. is perhaps best known for its plush recliners, the furniture manufacturer's IT department is looking to refurnish its own quarters this fall. Out will go 12 servers that now run La-Z-Boy's intranet and help desk; in will be the largest WinTel server available. The biggest residential furniture maker's corporate IT department hopes its server consolidation will fit into an overall plan to reduce the cost of IT services to its 10 operating units. The installation of a Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 running Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition will reduce the total cost of ownership by providing a single point of management and improved reliability, said La-Z-Boy director of corporate IT services Gary Clark. La-Z-Boy first discussed the ES7000 purchase with Unisys a year ago. Its business case focused on the lower cost of administering one server vs. 12. While Clark informed the company's then-CFO Fritz Jackson that those savings would be difficult to quantify, he also told him the new server likely would last three to five years longer, or twice as long as its old commodity servers. To determine the cost of ownership of the new server, Clark evaluated the cost of the purchase of the ES7000, the cost of maintaining the existing servers vs. maintaining the ES7000 and the cost of purchasing additional commodity servers for planned projects, including an enterprisewide Lawson Software HR/payroll project, and the deferral of costs by redeploying the existing 12 servers. The ES7000 will run a separate partition of Microsoft's SQL Server, which will host the data for the various apps. The ES7000 lets users add processors and reconfigure partitions as business needs change; La-Z-Boy is now running two four-processor partitions, although it can be expanded to a total of 32 processors. Why run a platform intended for large-scale data centers? "In the other versions of Windows, you don't have the same level of control over the operating system," Clark said. The Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition is the only version of the operating system that rivals the flexibility and reliability of Unix, said Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle. Although the server has been available for 18 months, it didn't reach its potential until last September, when Microsoft released the Datacenter Server edition. The additional control will let Clark's organization segment different processes and limit memory and storage at a much more granular level than other server versions of Windows. That will be critical as La-Z-Boy looks to use the server for various future initiatives -- including SQL database consolidation and other apps that require high availability and scalability -- and given that La-Z-Boy has about 50 U.S. and overseas manufacturing locations and 200 servers around the country, Clark said. "Our two basic tenets are operational excellence and velocity." said CIO Stanley Kirkwood. "We want to be able to respond quickly and supply superior service to our divisions." "If you look at it in terms of our overall goals, it will pay huge dividends," Clark said. The ES7000 will help meet the corporate "velocity" goal because of its ability to reconfigure flexibly, he added. Aberdeen Group research director Tom Manter agreed. "Hardware and software costs are coming down, and now enterprises such as La-Z-Boy can reduce support costs by simplifying their IT environment and reacting to higher performance needs as the workload dictates," he said. "It appears that the ES7000 is really helping them solve that problem." The ES7000 is the only available server to scale to 32 CPUs, Manter noted. He also said the server can accept new Intel CPUs -- such as the 64-bit Itanium microprocessor -- as they are released. The new server also lets La-Z-Boy to tie into a storage area network, "putting more of our information in one place, instead of putting the storage piece on each server, saving money from an additional capital expenditure perspective," Clark said. La-Z-Boy on Aug. 15 reported that its first-quarter earnings fell to $2.8 million, a 78 percent decrease from last year's quarter. Revenue dropped 11 percent to $459 million. Company officials said the downturn was due to a slumping economy and retail chain closures, such as those of Heilig-Meyers and Montgomery Ward.