StorageTek Debuts New Data Warehousing
Storage Solutions Group at SuperComm `98
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StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp.), a provider of network computing storage, announced its new data warehousing initiative from its Solutions Business Group at SuperComm '98. StorageTek's two initial offerings, the Atomic Data Store and the Data Warehousing Performance Scorecard, deliver data warehouse customers increased overall performance and better return on investment by delivering a more cost-effective and efficient data storage management system.
StorageTek's data warehouse products and services will incorporate its Nearline and OPENstorage product lines -- both available on Windows NT and UNIX -- and relationships with leading data warehouse software vendors and systems integrators to offer end-to-end storage management solutions. Leveraging StorageTek's 28 years of storage expertise and its experience with telco customers such as AT&T, Bell Atlantic and Cincinnati Bell, this new group will provide a family of complete, best-of-breed data warehouse storage management offerings to the telco industry.
"Throughout its history, StorageTek has been an innovator in developing solutions for increased corporate productivity and success through efficient storage of information," said Jean Reiczyk, general manager and vice president, StorageTek Solutions group. "Deregulation, that is taking place in environments such as the telecommunications industry, is driving companies to increasingly leverage their internal knowledge to gain a competitive edge. Our Data Warehouse group offers an open, best-of-breed solution for customers needing to manage and analyze corporate data."
StorageTek's Atomic Data Store is a complete hierarchy of open storage for data warehousing that cost-effectively and efficiently delivers valuable, detailed information for better decision making. It is the first to offer ready access to years worth of historical data stored in disk, optical and less costly tape, unlike current offerings that require information to be uploaded from tape and optical to disk before accessing the information. This best-of-breed storage system for atomic data, or the finest level of detail, equips companies with the ability to reduce implementation and deployment costs of enterprise-level decision support systems.
Initially, StorageTek will focus on U.S. telco firms that are altering the way they conduct business, primarily due to industry-wide deregulation. As competition increases, these companies must market their services more efficiently to both current and new customers, while at the same time repositioning their offerings to fulfill customer-specific needs. This environment requires companies to accurately understand customer needs by using powerful data warehouse technology to analyze atomic data.
Telecommunications service providers face the daunting task of retaining, reviewing and analyzing call detail records (CDR) to uncover customer calling patterns and behavior trends. Analysis becomes a timely and expensive task as enormous amounts of CDRs can be easily generated on a daily basis. With the Atomic Data Store, telco firms will be empowered with access to data sets that span longer than three to six months, which is typical in current solutions, through ready access of additional storage mediums-tape and optical.
StorageTek's Atomic Data Store includes integration services for each of the components to deliver a complete end-to-end solution. StorageTek products include: Nearline tape storage libraries that offer a complete hierarchy of storage, at a lower cost than disk system; and StorageTek's OPENstorage tape, disk and software solutions that ensures continuous, high-performance access to information and applications on Windows and NT. In addition, Hitachi's optical drive and Sun Microsystem's E Series server are offered in some configurations.
When combined with StorageTek's Data Warehouse Performance Scorecard, companies are equipped to aggressively manage data warehouse growth, cost, and performance by delivering measurable improvements in areas of access, speed, and data freshness. The result is increased effectiveness of a decision support environment and offers increased return on IT investment. StorageTek's Atomic Data Store, initially available to U.S. customers, and Data Warehouse Performance Scorecard are available via the StorageTek Web site at http://www.storagetek.com