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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (14415)	8/23/2002 2:33:18 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

An Army of one......unified view of the data. National Guard builds out 54 SANs in consolidation project By LUCAS MEARIAN AUGUST 22, 2002 The Army National Guard is spending about $10.5 million to deploy storage-area networks (SAN) in all 50 states and four territories where it has headquarters, in order to consolidate servers and its personnel and logistics data onto SAN islands that are aimed at reducing the complexity and cost of management. The National Guard's effort has involved 200TB of data storage. It follows a trend similar to one of the past few years in which private-sector companies have consolidated from servers that are directly attached to storage to centralized storage in regional data centers. The ultimate goal is to have one corporate data center and one disaster recovery facility. Larry Borkowski, the National Guard's chief of automation and plans, said the software the National Guard chose allows it to perform statewide data backups without cutting service to end users and opens the door to someday creating a national data backup architecture. Northrop Grumman Corp., a global aerospace and defense company, was contracted by the National Guard in January and began the installation with EMC Corp. storage arrays and management software in June. It is completing work in three or four states each week and expects to finish the job by October. "What they're doing is developing a strategy that's centered around a grouping of states moving to a core architecture focused around disaster recovery and business continuity," said Steve Alfieris, vice president and general manager of EMC's federal systems division. The National Guard is using EMC's TimeFinder software to take snapshots of its entire data set for backup, which virtually eliminates a backup window, Borkowski said. While Borkowski didn't know what the return on investment was in terms of dollars, he did say that centralizing management of storage would allow the organization to reallocate administrators to other duties such as coding. The primary function of the 54 SANs will be to handle personnel records management, finance, logistics, contracts and e-mail. The TimeFinder software is also benefiting the National Guard's software development efforts. Instead of having to upload production data sets from tape libraries every time programmers want to run a modified application code, they can use a replication tool to immediately provide a refreshed version of the data. The National Guard, which is running Oracle applications on HP-UX, Windows NT and 2000, has between 10 and 100 servers within each state. Borkowski said the organization needed a central storage management suite that could work across its entire infrastructure, which includes servers from Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. The storage is being consolidated on EMC's high-end Symmetrix arrays. Each data center is deploying EMC's ESN Manager software, which is part of the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company's so called AutoIS strategy, an initiative to swap application programming interfaces with those of competing vendors for interoperability in multivendor SANs. "It ties together very well with our existing architecture that we have at our [Arlington, Va.] headquarters, because we have EMC there. It also ties together well with the Army's architecture, because the majority of them have partial or complete EMC solutions," Borkowski said. Earlier this year, the National Guard standardized its Arlington headquarters operations on an EMC SAN to provide centralized storage to OS/390, HP Series 9000 N&L Class, HP-UX, Compaq, Dell, Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers and operating systems. computerworld.com