Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

AT&T WINS 'BEST SAN SOLUTION' AT STORAGE WORLD CONFERENCE

AT&T has received The Best SAN Solution award from the Total Solution Provider (TSP) Awards for Storage for an innovative, integrated Managed Hosting and Ultravailable storage solution that exceeded the clients requirements and addressed their business continuity challenges. The company received the award May 6 during a reception at Storage World Conference 2003 in Anaheim, Calif.

The TSP Awards for Storage were judged by industry analyst firms Gartner Dataquest, The Evaluator Group, the Enterprise Storage Group, and by an editor from Business Solutions magazine, a nationally distributed magazine that reaches technology VARs and integrators. An online vote of Storage World conferees also was conducted. Winners were selected based on the scope, complexity and integration of their solutions.

"The TSP Awards recognize leading solution providers, like AT&T, for their efforts in implementing technology," says Shannon Lampe Wilcox, Business Solutions Magazine's Editor In Chief. "There are a number of awards recognizing vendors for new technologies and products, but solution providers have often been the unsung heroes of the technology channel. After all, they're the feet on the street -- listening to customer needs and applying technology to solve these problems. AT&T's implementation of a SAN solution is an ideal example of a solution provider meeting a customer's technology needs."

"The value we bring to our storage clients is predictable performance," said Pat Traynor, AT&T Hosting and Managed Services vice president. "We ensure the availability, security, reliability of their critical data and business applications. We also understand that our clients need the freedom to focus on their business operations, unhindered by the complex technology and management functions required to keep their infrastructure and business applications up and running."

AT&T continues to invest in its extensive portfolio of managed services -- including hosting, business continuity and storage services. The company is helping customers design, deploy, manage and evolve their business processes through its expertise in interconnecting networks, services and applications across an enterprise.

AT&T's SAN (Storage Area Network) award application describes a private managed Web-based solution implemented for one of its enterprise hosting customers to deliver application integration, data recovery, and security capabilities for its Fortune 500 clients.

AT&T's solution consolidates many disparate application systems and includes a "bullet-proof" data recovery solution -- one that meets an aggressive Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of four to five hours. The solution incorporates existing Tape Backup and Restore (TBR) technologies, on- and off-site back up, and the ability to send the database and archive logs to the back-up location to recover the database.

AT&T's solution also eliminates a single database component or facility failure by replicating the databases for data recovery between two AT&T Internet data centers (IDCs). This networking-based integrated SAN solution maximizes performance, consolidates the storage infrastructure, simplifies data management and increases storage functionality.

AT&T leveraged it's relationship with EMC, and employed AT&T Ultravailable Storage Service and Network Attached Storage infrastructure to design highly reliable, secure access with guaranteed data integrity. AT&T uses the EMC ControlCenter family of management software in conjunction with its hosting services to ensure the accessibility and protection of the storage network.

AT&T provides businesses highly available, highly reliable managed data storage with continuous mirroring capabilities within AT&T IDCs, at customer data centers, or in alternate AT&T managed facilities.

AT&T managed hosting and storage solutions are built on AT&T's integrated Global Enterprise Management System's (iGEMS) platform, a proactive performance management system that captures, consolidates and correlates hosting metrics across applications, systems and networks, enabling an end-to-end service level agreement of 99.9 percent. The customer sees proof of performance via AT&T Managed Services Portal, an online gateway that provides visibility into a customer's application environment.

AT&T's managed hosting services grew by more than 100 percent in 2002. In addition to existing customers like 1-800-FLOWERS and Sam Ash Music Inc., AT&T closed, in the fourth quarter alone, more than 240 new hosting contracts with large and medium customers, including MarketWatch.com, The Tribune Company and the U.S. government's General Services Administration. In Europe and Asia, AT&T also provides managed hosting services to companies such as Jaguar Racing, Novell and Textron.

AT&T has received numerous industry accolades, including Best Managed Hosting Service (World Communications Awards). For more information on AT&T Managed Hosting Services, as well as the full Managed Services portfolio visit www.att.com/business.