STORAGETEK GIVES ENTERPRISES SIGNIFICANT COMPETITIVE EDGE WITH ATOMIC DATA STORE, FIRST SOLUTION TO EFFICIENTLY STORE AND ACCESS MULTIPLE TERABYTES OF CUSTOMER DATA

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp.), a provider of network computing storage, has proclaimed the Europe-wide availability of the Atomic Data Store, the first tool to allow direct access to data stored on the complete hierarchy of storage. This unique solution enables a company to store, access, and analyze years instead of months of its valuable customer data when making critical customer-related business decisions. With the Atomic Data Store, a company can combine the capacity of hierarchical storage using standard Structured Query Language (SQL) to retrieve row-level data from any media in the storage hierarchy, including tape.

Traditionally, due to size and capacity limitations, many warehouses only store and provide access to 20 percent of a company's detailed information. The rest of the data either is summarized or, in some cases, deleted. In line with the growing importance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), The Atomic Data Store is the first product to provide direct access to the other 80 percent of business-critical information that can equal to tens or hundreds of terabytes (TBs). The Atomic Data Store utilizes a complete hierarchy of open storage for data warehousing that efficiently delivers valuable, detailed information for better decision making. It is the first to offer ready access to years worth of data stored on disk, tape and any other medium.

"A data warehouse should provide enterprises sufficient storage capacity for all their valuable business data with on-line access and scalability for future growth, yet it should be affordable," says Aaron Zornes, Executive Vice President for Application Delivery Strategies at META Group. "An effective solution, such as StorageTek's, should provide a combination of disk storage for actively used data and Nearline storage for less active data. This combination can help overcome traditional limits of data warehouses-thereby greatly enhancing an organization's capabilities to support the extremely large data warehouses necessitated by Customer Relationship Management initiatives. "The Atomic Data Store protects and builds on the investments a company has already made in its data warehouse solutions as the Atomic Data Store can be implemented on top of present architectures. Because of its centralized approach, the StorageTek solution will also allow a company to capture, store, extract and distribute its data in a far more simplified way.

Telecommunications, finance, and retail companies must market their services more efficiently to current and potential customers, while at the same time reposition their offerings to fulfill customer-specific demands. In this highly competitive CRM environment, companies need powerful data warehousing technologies to store and analyze huge amounts of atomic data in order to study and understand a customer's needs.

Telecommunications service providers face the daunting task of retaining and reviewing call detail records (CDR) to analyze customer calling patterns, behavior trends and network utilization. This analysis becomes a timely and expensive task as enormous amounts of CDRs can be easily generated on a daily basis. In one year, the size of this data can amount to about 30 TB with traditional data warehousing allowing for only 1-2 TB, or three to six months of summarized CDRs, of this data to be stored. The Atomic Data Store empowers telecommunications firms by making their CDRs readily accessible by leveraging low-cost storage media like tape.

Fully integrated solution StorageTek's Atomic Data Store solution incorporates its Nearline and OPENstorage product lines, FileTek's StorHouse software, and Sun Microsystems' E Series servers and includes services to integrate the Atomic Data Store into a new or existing data warehouse infrastructure.

Information on StorageTek is available at http://www.storagetek.com on the World Wide Web.