Posts Tagged ‘Animal Health International’

Finite Resources Create Demand for a New Approach

Market research firm, IDC, recently released revenue estimates for the disk storage systems market. In 2011, the market grew over 8% and exceeded $31B. Given that the price we pay for a terabyte of storage continues to decline, that means that the growth rate of data is much higher. For many organizations, the growth rate is greater than 40% per year.  The flood in Thailand that disrupted disk drive manufacturers’ supply chains notwithstanding, thanks to manufacturing innovation, the suppliers have been able to keep up with companies’ almost insatiable demand for more storage resources.

Time is a very different resource. There’s no factory that makes time, so we can’t make more. We can only decide how we use time. In the world of business, we are increasingly deciding to use our time to be open and available for our customers. That means that there’s less time to protect the data that  we use to process orders, run our  factories, and communicate with our suppliers.

Faced with a challenge like this, we have had to transform our thinking. In computing, over the past couple of decades we have gone from doing one thing at a time to doing everything at once. We used to turn on our accounting and order-entry systems in the morning, bring up terminal services, process orders, shut down systems at the end of the work day, bring in an evening shift to run analysis, print reports, and then back up the data.  Now we process orders all day and all night, seven days a week. Terminals have been at least partially replaced by PCs, mobile device applications, and browser-based applications, but they need to be available throughout the day as well. The reports still need to be run and the data still needs to be backed up, and though reports and data backups may still occur at night, they are no longer being done in “off hours,” because there are no off hours.

This challenge is just one of the challenges that Tim Hays, VP of IT at Animal Health International, solved when he installed the Axxana Phoenix System RP and EMC RecoverPoint.  Because RecoverPoint provides application-consistent snapshots of data, which can then be used for processing reports and as sources for backups, restores, and data replication, there’s no need to worry about the limited supply of time. Thanks to RecoverPoint, production systems can continue to operate, with only a brief pause, while the snapshot is taken.  And thanks to Axxana, the data that is changed or created between the application-consistent snapshots is maintained and protected. This is critically important, because as Tim Hays said in his recent presentation on Wikibon’s Peer Incite, in a world where most transactions are electronic, if you lose your data, there’s no way to reconstruct the transactions.