Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL     In this article Our Scenario Company RFIs Cover Story: Nice, Neat Storage: The Reality

Engulf and Devour Corp. (EDC), our fictional financial services firm in Jacksonville, Fla., recently acquired five small banks, mortgage banking companies and finance organizations throughout the southern United States, and has become one of the region's largest consumer lenders.

During an earlier round of acquisitions, EDC left the acquired institutions' personnel in place to maintain a local presence but consolidated the companies' IT assets into one of EDC's two regional data centers. Then, EDC expanded its frame relay network to the acquired firms' sites to provide access to remotely hosted applications.

That strategy worked because EDC and its acquisitions were IBM mainframe shops. In preparation for 2000, however, the institutions migrated older applications off the mainframe systems and rehosted them on a mixture of open-systems platforms.

EDC Scenario Click here to enlarge

As a result, EDC's IT infrastructure has become too decentralized. EDC has consolidated most critical applications into two mirrored data centers, in Jacksonville and in Huntsville, Ala. However, diversity persists, especially in data-storage technology. EDC's storage architecture comprises large and small server-attached storage arrays, network-attached storage and even a primordial Fibre Channel storage-area network (see "EDC Scenario" diagram, at right). The new storage-technology acquisitions, driven by burgeoning data, represent approximately half the company's annual IT budget and are the largest IT expenditures.

Like any financial firm, EDC depends on the efficient application of information technology to deliver customer services promptly. The company also wishes to use business intelligence and data warehousing to help identify new opportunities. Furthermore, within the year EDC intends to launch online banking under multiple brand identities, so customers of its acquired business units can work with their preferred institutions online. These endeavors will drive up IT costs in a distributed and poorly managed IT infrastructure.

Last, the company is concerned about data recoverability in the wake of a disaster. Experience with Hurricane Floyd in September 1999 encouraged EDC to establish a basic disaster-recovery plan in which the two regional data centers acted as backup sites for each other. However, this strategy has lagged behind changes in each site's IT infrastructure. EDC is introducing significant new challenges, given the diversity of storage platforms and topologies in the acquired companies and the data growth trends topping 70 percent per year.