Storage integrity for businesses

Ask any group of data management executives what is keeping them awake most nights, and you're likely to hear the same two words 'data storage'. Never before has the demand been greater, technologies more transitory or solutions vague; and the penalties for choosing the wrong alternative have never been higher.

To keep pace with these issues, organisations are working to change and improve their current storage infrastructure. But without sound planning and experience with new technologies, efforts to improve the existing environment may actually perpetuate new problems.

Sound planning requires time and resources that may not be available if IT staff are already overworked and overwhelmed by the effort of maintaining and troubleshooting an infrastructure that has exceeded its planned capacity and is long overdue for upgrades or replacement. Experience with new technologies is unlikely to exist among current IT staff members. With storage needs doubling for the average company every eight to twelve months, it is critical that storage networks be scalable and easy to administrate.

VERITAS Software offers a conciliatory, well-designed technology that provides relatively low cost of entry, full interoperability, single-point management, ease of use, and the ability to control previous investments in hardware and software both now and as the company grows.

When you are missing a skill-set, with stretched resources and don't have the time to stop to plan, when do you turn? Data storage consultants offer the best alternative. VERITAS Consulting, for example, applies field-proven methodologies and technology-leading storage expertise to ensure organisations storage strategies and product deployments match the storage integrity companies require, their business needs, while reducing costs and risks.

Deploying Proven Solutions
To minimise risk, today's storage designs must work across multiple subcomponents, network protocols and hardware platforms to deliver the right functionality, reliability and manageability.

Ideally, an organisation should test all their solutions against multiple configurations of third-party products to minimise guesswork and maximises the robustness of organisations storage solution, resulting in reduced cost of deployment and total cost of ownership.

The Value of Consultancy
Consulting brings a structured, proven methodology and portfolio of expertise to ensure successful customer engagements from definition to delivery. We compliment this structured methodology with a flexible consulting model. Customer's can engage our services at any point during their project lifecycle and we can tailor our service offerings to meet specific customer needs.

For example, VERITAS Consulting methodology is built on four core components.


• Discover -identification of the areas where an organisation's storage architecture does not meet their business needs, and present the company with a step-by-step plan for enhancing or replacing their existing architecture to reduce costs and improve storage manageability, scalability, and availability.


• Design - When VERITAS Consulting works with your customer through the design phase, you can be assured that the customer's final design will be robust and scaleable. We help you to 'set the standard' for hardware and software selection.


• Deploy - VERITAS Consulting is the obvious choice for deployment. We are the experts. We provide 'best practice' guidelines customised to each customer's implementation. Customers achieve rapid deployment; complemented by knowledge transfer via hands-on product orientation and a site-specific Installation and Operation Guide to help them efficiently run and manage their new storage architecture.


• Optimise - We provide a collection of services and tools to help your customers maximise their VERITAS investment. Services include System Health Checks, Operational Best Practice Reviews and Operational Management Tools. Comprehensive performance reviews by VERITAS Consulting ensure your customers the highest levels of satisfaction with their existing VERITAS software investment.

In large enterprise environments, executives and CIOs now understand how critical planning and design are to a successful engagement. Decisions are being brought to board level and decisions on the choice of vendor are being made based on the level of services offered - decision makers realise the value of a design built by people with the most experience and the most expertise. A storage architecture built by VERITAS Consulting ensures a robust, scalable design that incorporates that maximise organisation hardware.

As enterprises try to manage their storage resources with proportionally fewer administrators, the worldwide storage management software market is forecast to grow from $5.3 billion in 2000 to $16.7 billion in 2005, according to Gartner, Inc.

The continued downturn in the U.S. economy means that CIOs are looking for return on investment programs that confirm the savings made through total cost of ownership. And as data storage and data management is still growing, driven by the use of Web-based applications, multimedia data and data warehousing, and business intelligence implementations, it demands better storage administration tools and solutions.

The resulting storage management environments will demand consistent, integrated and automated tools. Other vendors must quickly, and consistently, follow VERITAS Software's example by implementing management standards defined and provide application program interfaces that take enterprise data storage management one-step further.