After deciding last year to standardise its mainframe storage requirements on the EMC platform local retail conglomerate, Edgars Stores Limited, has extended this decision to cover its open systems applications. Drew Kennedy, GIS manager: DSS at Edgars, says the move made sense for reasons of reliability, performance and scalability. "We selected EMC as our DASD [Direct Access Storage Device] platform of choice on our mainframe and open systems. When our Oracle-based data warehouse outgrew the space available the logical course of action was to follow the same path," he says. The result was the development of Edgars` data warehouse on Sequent servers` and EMC Symmetrix enterprise storage subsystems. "Within the same footprint a dedicated storage area is used for data warehouse and the remainder is set aside for development work," says Kennedy. Providing a telling indictment of why the retailer chose the EMC platform, he says the database is growing by more than eight gigabytes a month. "This makes scalability of the storage subsystem the most important characteristic for us. With EMC Symmetrix we simply add more disks as and when we run out of space." Mark Hill, senior account manager at EMC SA, confirms this saying the subsystem purchased by the Edgars Group could scale to well over 800GB by using 18GB hard disks in place of the current 9GB models. "Another issue to consider is that, since Edgars has standardised on EMC Symmetrix for storage across the enterprise, it is possible to cascade subsystems across the enterprise - providing a combined platform for both mainframe and open systems data. "This ability to create a centralised storage farm for all business data, regardless of server platform, enables EMC and its partner - Sequent - to deliver true enterprise storage." Looking to the future, Kennedy sees potential for some of EMC`s software products. "The most likely is TimeFinder which could be used for refreshing our data warehouse or Year 2000 testing," he says.
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