In the case of FleetBoston Financial's seasoned storage management staff knew what systems to implement to get fileTrust, a secure Internet-based storage system for customers' electronic documents, up and running in accordance with a corporate mandate for online banking services. But the in-house personnel were already devoting all their time to completing a merger with BankBoston while concurrently finishing up Y2K testing.
Marcel Meth, Fleet's director of Global Internet Strategies, and his staff decided to outsource the storage demands of fileTrust to Storage Networks.
In eWEEK Labs' on-site evaluation of StorageNetworks' data centre and the global operations centre from which StorageNetworks manages storage systems all over the US, we were impressed with the infrastructure and ease of use of the company's management tools, which we saw from the perspective of a customer.
Harnessing its expertise in cutting-edge storage technology, solid infrastructure and powerful management tools, StorageNetworks provides the enterprise-class data storage that large customers such as FleetBoston--a global, diversified financial services company with 22 million customers in more than 20 countries and assets exceeding US$200 billion--require for their Internet-age applications.
At the same time, outsourcing such resource-intensive applications to StorageNetworks and companies like it can eliminate the painful management headaches that go hand in hand with these new storage technologies.
"Outsourcing really helped," Meth said. "We probably would not have released the product at the same time, and even our competitors were impressed with the speed at which we got online."
