EDS: Case Study Brief
Business Issues
EDS has a large and diverse client base, with clients operating in various industry segments and making use of diverse technologies. The EDS database is extensive and the need to maintain a client's historic database is an ongoing concern for EDS; the company cannot, under any circumstance, run the risk of losing the client's information. With StorageTek equipment, EDS ensures a solution for each case.
The Solutions
To ensure true 24x7 operation, EDS uses high-volume storage solutions, all of them from StorageTek, including four PowderHorn 9310 tape libraries and one 4410. "We started working with StorageTek back in 1996.
"We started working with StorageTek back in 1996. We needed them to bring our technological park up to date and, because we acquired some new clients, we purchased four silos. Shortly after, we bought the fifth robot," said Alexandre Simcsik, EDS Operations manager. "Before buying heavy artillery equipment like these we, of course, go through an extensive assessment of the supplier to check performance, equipment capacity, maintenance costs, services and commitment of the potential supplier. StorageTek aced all our tests," he said.
Just about all Brazilian telecom companies store data with EDS. In addition, in the EDS portfolio we find companies in areas such as technology, power and finance, plus a huge company in the automotive industry. We are talking about well-known brand names, companies with extraordinarily large databases, which mostly operate with mainframe solutions. "Two of the huge benefits StorageTek offers to help us better support all our clients are a smaller batch window - only possible because of fast equipment - and a reduction of the necessary night processing time, thus maintaining data online for a longer period of time," said Simcsik.
Since 1999, EDS has been using Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) to support its telecom clients. "The speed at which VSM communicates with the mainframe to store our information is even higher than that of the robot," said Rogerio Comotti, EDS Hardware and Infrastructure manager. VSM allows batch-processing operations to be completed much faster than before. With VSM, we are meeting our goal: system downtime is brought to a minimum." Another benefit of VSM is its ability to perform tape data set stacking. This allows for the full utilization of tape cartridge capacities which results in fewer cartridges overall. "Today, we have higher cartridge capacities than in the past, and the resulting utilization and speed are much greater," he said.