Paul Ventura, Meta Group's managing director for Asia Pacific agrees. Ventura claims that the cost of managing data storage is approaching 40 per cent of organisations' total IT hardware expenditure and that this figure could rise as high as 60 per cent.
However, for paint specialists, Taubmans Group, an upgrade of its Baan ERP system that incorporated a new EMC Symmetrix storage system, was, in the words of development manager, Nigel Thompson, a -have to have, rather than a nice to have".
Taubmans was experiencing a huge growth in transactions and also needed to reduce its backup window, which at over 10 hours was crippling the company. This, along with new functional requirements necessitated a storage platform that could deliver a 24x7 highly redundant and resilient solution.
Taubmans is using the Symmetrix system to protect its data from unscheduled downtime, manage data recovery and centralise its backup system as well as provide support for its point-of-sale systems. Fundamental to the solution is the software component, TimeFinder, which maintains a higher level of availability and allows Taubmans in background mode to create independently addressable business continuance volumes for mainframe, Unix and Windows NT information storage.
At a cost of $1.8 million, Thompson admits the overall project was a big investment. And while the company locally had no problems cost justifying it, it took some convincing to get Taubmans' parent company in South Africa, the Barlow group, to approve it.
-The payback period is pretty hard to [quantify], but we were being crippled by what we were doing. The previous system couldn't keep the information the business needed. Now we have information at our fingertips," Thompson says.
