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Storage Pipeline: State of the Art: Storage on Demand: Page 2 of 4

When a customer wants to run SAP in BlueStar's data center, for instance,
BlueStar can take over the customer's equipment or lease space on its own
equipment, which includes 1,200 production servers and 130 TB of storage, says
Bill Augustadt, the service provider's CTO and chief architect. BlueStar pools
and allocates these resources using technology from Veritas Software. This is
the best solution for Veritas, Augustadt says, because, unlike hardware vendors
that focus on their own platforms, BlueStar does not lock users into a single
environment. "Veritas lives or dies on how it works in heterogeneous
environments," he says.

In terms of zoning, which controls who can see what data on a storage-area
network, and to a lesser extent, virtualization, which provides a single view of
all the resources on a SAN, storage is the most developed on-

demand resource, Augustadt says. "We have two and a half people running 130
TB of storage on a 24x7 basis. We consider that normal. I laugh if someone says
they need 10 people to run that much storage."

A more extreme example of how far on-demand storage has advanced comes from
CGI, a Toronto IT service provider with a focus on customers in the
life-sciences industry. Life sciences is an immature industry experiencing
tenfold to twentyfold growth, says Perry Marshall, CGI vice president of
marketing for government, health-care and emerging technologies. "We need to
find a way to provide raw computing to such companies while letting them focus
on their life-science work," he says. "One bioscience customer is less than five
years old but already consuming more raw storage than the largest regional
bank."