Fujitsu Hong Kong Limited

Got SRM? Fujitsu's Softek Software To Help Major Milk Producer Defer Storage Purchases for Next Five Years

Softek Storage Manager Catches CIO Attention By Preventing Application Outages, Managing Storage Assets Efficiently

Hong Kong, June 6, 2003 — Fujitsu Hong Kong Limited, a leading provider of information technology and telecommunications solutions and services, today announced that its enterprise storage resource management (SRM) solution, Softek™ Storage Manager, has already helped Seoul Milk, South Korea's oldest and one of the largest suppliers of dairy products, defer storage purchases during a five-year period. With the Softek SRM solution, Seoul Milk is now reducing its overall cost of ownership by managing its storage assets more efficiently, improving IT staff productivity and preventing application outages.

Cutting operational costs and improving business efficiencies were key business initiatives for Seoul Milk to install an eight-terabyte storage area network (SAN). The SAN supports a high-end, UNIX-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for processing all customer orders.

"Purchasing additional disk space was not an option," said Gueng-Tae Kim, director of information technology at Seoul Milk. "The initial results from Softek Storage Manager were more than we expected. We thought we were managing our storage efficiently. However, once we installed Softek Storage Manager, we immediately saw a more complete picture of our storage environment. It enabled us to automate our storage management policies and also reclaimed a significant amount of disk space during the first hours of deployment.

"Softek Storage Manager immediately diagnosed the causes of our wasted space and also helped to identify why two 'disk full' outages occurred within three months on our application server. Preventing these outages caught the CIO's attention and resulted in the product's purchase and ROI justification."

From one central location, Softek Storage Manager helped Seoul Milk's IT department examine the capacity and the characteristics of files - type, size, creator, etc. - on two Oracle database servers, an application server, and a development server. This information enabled storage allocation for each networked server based on business needs and optimum performance capacity.

Prior to obtaining the SRM product, the IT staff spent several hours a day running UNIX scripts to carry out corporate policies for storage. For example, one policy states that all files in the temporary directories are to be removed after a week. "These methods proved to be unproductive and couldn't prevent a server outage," said Kim.

Softek Storage Manager easily translated Seoul Milk's storage policies into automated action sets on the four servers. Now, the IT staff is alerted when disk usage reaches or exceeds certain thresholds on each server's partitions.

Softek Storage Manager also reports on all sources of wasted space, such as duplicates, aged files and unnecessary files types. It not only detects these files, it will automatically delete or archive them.

"Softek Storage Manager enables us to control our storage growth without us having to lift a finger or to worry about scrambling to add more disk space," said Kim. "We can now assign our staff to work on other value-added projects that are more strategic to the business.

"As the first customer for Softek Storage Manager in the Asia Pacific region, Seoul Milk has validated our value proposition for managing storage within heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments," said Scott Kennedy, vice president of strategic business development at Softek. "We are pleased to have helped them better plan their storage assets, realize a higher return on invested capital and to keep Korea's dairy products flowing smoothly from producer to consumer."

---

About Seoul Milk

Founded in 1937, Seoul Milk today ranks as the oldest and one of the largest suppliers on milk products in South Korea. The one litre size of the Seoul Milk brand of fresh milk has become the country's best selling dairy beverage product. At the forefront of agricultural education, Seoul Milk provides its 4,000 co-op member farmers with training programs to improve farm productivity and disease prevention. The company, based in Seoul, has approximately 1,800 employees and yearly revenues of $725 million (USD).
For more information, please see:  http://www.seoulmilk.co.kr/

About Fujitsu Hong Kong

Fujitsu Hong Kong, a leading technology company, is one of the largest providers of customer-focused information technology and telecommunications (IT & T) solutions and services for organizations in Hong Kong. With more than 50 years of experience and as part of the Fujitsu Group-a global family of IT & T infrastructure experts-Fujitsu Hong Kong extends its expertise across the enterprise and around the region. Fujitsu Hong Kong is able to support and optimize world-class IT & T infrastructure for organizations in the region that require to gain a global and competitive edge needed for a sustainable future. Major customers include Government of HKSAR, Cathay Pacific Airways, PCCW, and more.

Softek and Softek Storage Manager are trademarks of Fujitsu Software Technology Corporation. Fujitsu and the Fujitsu logo are registered trademarks of Fujitsu Limited. Other mentioned trademarks are trademarks of their respective companies.
For more information, please see: http://hk.fujitsu.com/

---

Press Contacts