Electronic Finance Software
A Worldwide Leader in electronic finance software
The Problem:
This Worldwide Leader in electronic finance software had a need to implement a disk storage technology that could support the MVS platform as well as the distributed systems servers. They also needed a solution that could plug into a Storage Area Network when the time came.
The Process:
This Worldwide Leader in electronic finance software had looked at EMC as a possible solution to their problem, but in the end felt that IBM had the right solution. The reasons they bought from Solutions II and IBM could be attributed to several factors. One is that the ESS has a more advanced architecture that can be upgraded whenever the customer needs to. The customer owns the subsystem and did not require an IBM CE to perform reconfiguration duties. Two, the Total Cost of Ownership was less expensive than a Symmetrix. They also were happy with the support they were receiving from IBM. Third, when Solutions II and IBM presented their solution to the client, neither degraded EMC. The technology was simply presented and demonstrated as to how it would solve their business problem. They liked this style of business.
The Solution:
The solution for these requirements was the Enterprise Storage Server. The client was one of the earliest adopters of this technology in the country.
Within six months of implementing the ESS, the customer purchased an IBM 3494 automated tape library to support their backups. Along with this, they bought Tivoli Storage Manager to administer their backups and recoveries. They use a disk partition on the ESS for their incremental backups of TSM on a nightly basis. The ESS and the 3494 are SAN ready with fibre connectivity. The TSM solution manages their data over the SAN.
The Result:
The customer was able to implement a shared disk array and tape backup solution on the SAN that all platforms could access. This ranged from the S/390 to NT to OS/400. The value that was awarded to the customer was the ability to centrally manage their disk and tape pools from one source so that both systems could easily be administered for changes. This eliminated the growth restriction that natively attached disk and tape bounded them to. Now that the disk subsystem is in place, remote replication of their data has become an easier process.