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Cox Scopes Out Its SAN

Cox Communications Inc. (NYSE: COX), the fourth largest cable operator in the U.S., has beefed up its storage management capabilities as it strides into a new sector of the communications market (see Storability Upgrades, Gets Cox).

Earlier this month Cox announced an 18 percent jump in its fourth-quarter revenues, in large part due to record growth in telephone subscriptions. The company said it added approximately 67,190 Cox Digital Telephone subscribers, ending 2002 with 718,420 customers, or 58 percent more than the year before (see Cox Voice Gambit Pays Off ).

Right now, the company has just over 100 TBytes of storage capacity in EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix and Clariion systems, as well as some older Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) arrays, which it has discovered can be much better managed and utilized to cope with its newfound growth (see Dell Plugs Cox Into EMC).

That storage, most of which is direct attached, is connected to Dell, HP, and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) Solaris servers. And taking care of this fat storage environment, by the way, are just two SAN administrators.

"We badly needed reporting capabilities to create modified reports on the storage environment to manage it better on a day-to-day basis," says Edd Smith, storage architect at Cox. [Edd. note: Yepp, Edd has two d's in his name.]

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