Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

GOT SRM? FUJITSU'S SOFTEK HELPS MAJOR MILK PRODUCER

Softek, a leading provider of storage management software, recently announced that its enterprise storage resource management (SRM) solution, Softek Storage Manager, is helping Seoul Milk, South Korea's oldest major supplier of dairy products, to defer storage hardware purchases for a five-year period. With the Softek SRM solution, Seoul Milk is reducing its overall cost of ownership by managing its storage assets more efficiently, improving IT staff productivity and preventing application outages.

Cutting operational costs and improving business efficiencies were key business initiatives for Seoul Milk to install an eight-terabyte storage area network (SAN). The SAN supports a high-end, UNIX-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for processing all customer orders.

"Purchasing additional disk space was not an option," said Gueng-Tae Kim, director of information technology at Seoul Milk. "The initial results from Softek Storage Manager were more than we expected. We thought we were managing our storage efficiently. However, once we installed Softek Storage Manager, we immediately saw a more complete picture of our storage environment. It enabled us to automate our storage management policies and also reclaimed a significant amount of disk space during the first hours of deployment.

"Softek Storage Manager immediately diagnosed the causes of our wasted space and also helped to identify why two 'disk full' outages occurred within three months on our application server. Preventing these outages caught the CIO's attention and resulted in the product's purchase and ROI justification."

From one central location, Softek Storage Manager helped Seoul Milk's IT department examine the capacity and the characteristics of files -- type, size, creator, etc. -- on two Oracle database servers, an application server, and a development server. This information enabled storage allocation for each networked server based on business needs and optimum performance capacity.

Prior to obtaining the SRM product, the IT staff spent several hours a day running UNIX scripts to carry out corporate policies for storage. "These methods proved to be unproductive and couldn't prevent a server outage," said Kim.

Softek Storage Manager easily translated Seoul Milk's storage policies into automated action sets on the four servers. Now, the IT staff is alerted when disk usage reaches or exceeds certain thresholds on each server's partitions.

Softek Storage Manager also reports on all sources of wasted space, such as duplicates, aged files and unnecessary files types. It not only detects these files, it will automatically delete or archive them.

"Softek Storage Manager enables us to control our storage growth without us having to lift a finger or to worry about scrambling to add more disk space," said Kim. "We can now assign our staff to work on other value-added projects that are more strategic to the business."

"The selection of Softek Storage Manager by a pillar of the Korean business community is further confirmation that our value proposition for managing storage within heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments is a globally recognized currency," said Scott Kennedy, vice president of strategic business development at Softek. "We are pleased to have helped Seoul Milk better manage their storage assets, realize a higher return on invested capital and to keep Korea's dairy products flowing smoothly from producer to consumer."

About Softek

Softek delivers award-winning automated storage area management (SAM) solutions operating across more vendors and platforms than any other SAM software. With Softek, customers are able to both optimize and simplify the management of complex, multi-vendor storage infrastructures via action-based automated resource management including space management, storage provisioning, data replication, data migration, performance monitoring, service level management, data recovery and backup. The result is betterutilized storage, more productive staffs, and greater application availability. Backed by the financial strength of Fujitsu Limited, Softek is distributed globally and offers 24/7 support to more than 700 customers worldwide. www.softek.fujitsu.com