Data Backup and Storage Management

Executive Summary

Overview
A leading European telecommunications firm with over four million subscribers experienced rapid growth in its wireless customers, resulting in business and IT challenges that threatened its ability to manage future growth and profitability. In addition, the company potentially faced increased risk from unreliable data management practices. As a result, the company engaged Fujitsu Services, a global provider of customer-focused IT and communications solutions, to help it address these challenges and lay a solid and responsible foundation for future growth, along with effective data management strategies.

Barriers
Managing a fast-growing business like mobile communications and services requires efficient, robust data management—from network-level transmission data to customer records to billing systems. After a period of rapid growth, the telecommunications firm found that it had outgrown its data backup and storage management strategies, resulting in inefficient and unreliable data backup practices that exposed the company to potential business risk. The company had no effective way to monitor backups, analyze storage utilization, or manage storage allocation.

The Solution
In order to address the above backup and storage management challenges, the IT team engaged the IT Managed Services group from Fujitsu Services to implement an ITIL-based configuration management database (CMDB) for managing backup and storage management policies. The Fujitsu Services consultant worked with the IT team to create key performance indicators as well as service-level and operational- level agreements with its internal customers. For the technology portion of the solution, the Fujitsu Services consultant and the IT team implemented Veritas CommandCentral Storage in July 2005. The team then added Veritas CommandCentral Enterprise Reporter in February 2008.

Benefits
Fujitsu Services was able to help the telecommunications firm achieve dramatic improvements in its backup success rates, storage allocation processes, and storage utilization rates as a result of the above solution. A Total Operational and Economic (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group identified quantified metrics in the following areas:

• Backup and recovery labor productivity gains: $611,182 USD (€485,000)1 in IT labor productivity gains from staff time spent managing and troubleshooting backups from January 2006 to December 2009.
• Storage utilization cost avoidance: $1,750,000 USD (€1,389,000) in a one-time storage cost avoidance through the recapture of 50 terabytes of storage in 2008.
• Media cost savings: $744,005 USD (€600,000) in tape media cost savings because of improved storage utilization from January 2006 through December 2009.
• Savings in offsite media storage costs: $630,000 USD (€500,000) in offsite media stor- age costs from January 2007 to December 2009.

For more information on Alchemy Group or to download this document, go to http://www.alchemygroupinc.com/category/research/bva/