IBM this week announced that SunGard eSourcing is deploying a 120-terabyte IBM Storage Area Network (SAN) to consolidate customer data between its numerous servers, running on diverse operating platforms.
According to the companies, SunGard eSourcing, part of SunGard Business Continuity and Internet Services (BCIS), an operating group of SunGard, was facing a data storage challenge. As a provider of co-location and managed hosting services, as well as high performance Internet access and high-bandwidth networking, it supported different operating environments from NT to UNIX to mainframe servers. As business grew, SunGard eSourcing managed its growth by adding storage servers whenever data reached capacity. This required a team of storage administrators to dedicate a combined 40 to 60 hours per week to handle the dispersed data.
SunGard eSourcing’s solution was to network its storage and consolidate the number of devices. According to the company, “IBM offered us a total solution, complete with hardware, software and services, all at a competitive price…Our SAN gives us a flexible, scalable way to share and manage data for customers. At the same time, it significantly reduces our administrative costs.”
SunGard eSourcing implemented a SAN comprising three IBM Magstar tape libraries and an additional three IBM Enterprise Storage Servers (code named “Shark”) to store more than two terabytes of online data. Tivoli Storage Management Software was also included to provide easy distributed SAN management.
