3.2 Terabyte IBM 'Shark' Moves Primerica to 24 x 7 Availability.Business & Technology Editors ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 2000 IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) announced today that one of the nation's leading financial services The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page. providers, Primerica Financial Services Primerica Financial Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Citigroup, is a multi-level marketing[1] company headquartered in Duluth, Georgia. It is the largest financial services marketing organization in North America, with more than 100,000 licensed independent , has chosen the 'Shark' Enterprise Storage Server, the industry's most advanced disk storage system, to manage its increasing customer service operations and protect its data. Primerica is one of the world's largest financial organizations, serving more than six million customers. The Shark ESS enables Primerica to access data from the company's web-based programs designed to educate families on a spectrum of financial services. "Having a centralized, highly available, ultra-fast storage system across our S/390, UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). and NT platforms that is tightly coupled See tight coupling. with our disaster recovery and business resumption plans is critical to our strategic IT vision. 'Shark' delivers on this goal," said David R. Wade, Primerica's executive vice president and chief information officer. IBM's Shark ESS fits neatly into Primerica's existing IT environment. At the Atlanta data center, Primerica's IT staff manages two Enterprise Storage Servers at 1.6 TB each. The Sharks are attached to the IBM S/390 server platform. A variety of software applications run on the OS/390 operating system operating system (OS) Software that controls the operation of a computer, directs the input and output of data, keeps track of files, and controls the processing of computer programs. , including PeopleSoft, ImagePlus and Batch. NT and AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) IBM's Unix-based operating system which runs on its Intellistation workstations and pSeries, p5, iSeries and i5 server families. applications will be added to these two Sharks by the end of March. "Product longevity was part of the reason we chose Shark over all its competitors, including EMC (1) (EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA, www.emc.com) The leading supplier of storage products for midrange computers and mainframes. Founded in 1979 by Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino, EMC has developed advanced storage and retrieval technologies for the world's largest companies. . It fulfilled our need to choose a solution that would provide more than five years of a useful lifespan as well as uptime for running batch production Batch production is a manufacturing process used to produce or process any product in batches, as opposed to a continuous production process, or a one-off production. The primary characeristic of batch production is that all components are completed at a workstation before they tests," explained Glenn Chandler, senior storage administrator, Primerica. "The upgrade was the next evolutionary step in our DASD-based storage platform." The Shark Enterprise Storage Server is the groundbreaking storage solution from IBM, the world leader in storage systems, software, services and technology. Built on the foundation of IBM's Seascape (1) Storage Enterprise Architecture, `Shark' works with heterogeneous hosts and operating systems -- Windows NT, UNIX, Novell NetWare, S/390 and AS/400 -- and with a variety of interfaces, including Fibre Channel, Ultra SCSI and ESCON (Enterprise Systems CONnection) An IBM S/390 fiber-optic channel that transfers 17 Mbytes/sec over distances up to 60 km depending on connection type. ESCON allows peripheral devices to be located across large campuses and metropolitan areas. . 'Shark' incorporates such unique technology as Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) and Multiple Allegiance. For more information on the Enterprise Storage Server and its performance advantages over competing products, visit www.ibm.com/storage. 1 Seascape is IBM's storage enterprise architecture, a blueprint for comprehensive storage solutions optimized for a connected world. The Seascape architecture outlines next-generation concepts for storage by integrating modular "building block" technologies from IBM, including disk, tape and optical storage media, powerful processors, and rich software. Integrated Seascape solutions are highly reliable, scaleable and versatile, and support specialized applications on servers ranging from PCs to supercomputers. 2 IBM 'unique technology' such as Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) and Multiple Allegiance, are currently unavailable in competing systems from EMC, Hitachi Data and Compaq. 3 IBM and Enterprise Storage Server are registered trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective companies. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion