Fujitsu Hong Kong Limited

Fujitsu's Softek Storage Manager Realizes Immediate Return on Investment and Minimal Total Cost of Ownership

Managing Increasing Number of Storage with Existing Resources Effectively

Hong Kong, February 24, 2003 — Businesses are experiencing dramatic storage growth and cost. Due to an explosive growth in enterprise data, IT organizations are struggling to manage their storage resources while keeping their costs down. Industry experts estimate storage to be growing from 60 percent to 100 percent per year. Over the past few years, this trend appears to be accelerating.

Fujitsu's Softek Storage Manager software, a storage resource management (SRM) solution, is designed specifically to meet the complex storage management requirements. Softek Storage Manager received widespread recognition when first launched in the United States in 2002. Media was excited by this new management tool. The product received two awards from the media in the United States, including the Gold Award of Storage Management Software in the Best Storage Product of 2002 presented by Storage Magazine and SearchStorage.com and eWeek's "Best IT Buys".

"this product [Softek Storage Manager] will likely pay for itself very quickly by, for example, hunting down potentially illegal content that wastes precious storage space and by giving storage manager the ability to quantify storage usage and create chargeback policies to justify budgets." (eWeek, 10 February 2003) "[Softek] Storage Manager gives users the most management for their IT buck." (Storage Magazine and SearchStorage.com, January 2003)

Issues and Challenges

Take a minute to count the number of different storage management platforms, protocols, operating systems, business-critical applications, data sources and volumes in your organization. Then count the number of different storage management tools your IT department has to master in order to manage them. It adds up to a lot of complexity. What is more, many of your disparate storage assets go untapped because there is no uniform way to optimize them.

With applications growing exponentially, organizations are gobbling up more and more storage. Large terabyte-sized databases, e-mail, MP3 and graphic files are just a few of the reasons driving this trend. Organizations are creating more information than they can manage, often doubling storage data each year.

Although storage cost per terabyte is declining, the sheer growth in storage consumed and the resources required to manage it is forcing IT organizations to grapple with rising total storage costs. Industry analysts project storage investments will exceed 50 percent of an organization's IT spending this year.

Savvy IT executives are discovering that many of their current storage resources are not effectively utilized. It is estimated that only 40 percent of storage capacity is utilized. Furthermore, many storage administrators do not know how much storage they have or how it is being used.

The complexity of today's enterprise storage environments is increasingly becoming a challenge for businesses. Storage topologies such as storage area networks (SAN), direct-attached storage (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS), coupled with other intelligent storage devices have added to the storage management challenge. Finally, large enterprise must often contend with storage in geographically dispersed locations.

The competitive business environment does not allow for application downtime. Along with the benefits of a global marketplace come the expectations that businesses operate at 24/7. Vital information must be functioning and operating at full efficiency. E-mail and large critical application data housed within storage devices have become critical components of day-to-day business operations. Businesses cannot afford downtime for these components.

The Requirements for a Solution

Businesses need a SRM solution that addresses the current challenges of their complex storage environment. Fujitsu's Softek Storage Manager revolutionizes the management of the complex storage environment, managing storage across all platforms by a single product and console and ensuring 24/7 availability while controlling storage-related costs.

Fujitsu's Softek Storage Manager- a Tool You Need

Softek Storage Manager improves return on investment (ROI) and lowers storage total cost of ownership (TCO) by automating manual tasks, increasing storage asset utilization and preventing outages. It helps organizations manage unlimited storage growth with the existing resources and increase the storage utilization to 70 percent or more, so organizations can realize an immediate ROI. It is also hardware-vendor and OS-platform independent, so organizations can optimize the deployment of all the storage resources- any hardware, any vendor, any platform.

Softek Storage Manager provides answers to all the queries in IT managers' mind:

• Centralized management - view and manage storage resources from a single console
• Meaningful reporting - assess how storage resources are used, and identify capacity and performance trends with views at both the physical and logical layer
• Operation across heterogeneous environments - monitor and manage storage resources across hardware vendors, platforms and operating systems as well as disparate storage topologies
• Automation of routine tasks - schedule actions based on pre-defined criteria
• Business-process views - define and view storage as it applies to the business model
• Management of storage-related costs - assess, utilize and where possible, reduce storage costs
• Management of service-level requirements - proactively manage service levels as required by the business

With the help of Fujitsu's Softek Storage Manager, data storage in the complex storage environment is getting a lot easier and simpler.

For more information about Fujitsu Softek products, please visit http://hk.fujitsu.com/ or call 2828 2833.

Product Feature Highlights

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About Fujitsu Softek

Fujitsu Softek delivers the first powerful alternative to traditional storage management. The company offers a complete suite of storage management software, which operates across multiple storage vendors and platforms allowing customers to realize best-in-class ROI from their storage assets. Fujitsu Softek offers storage management solutions in storage resource management, storage provisioning, SAN management, data migration, replication, backup, disaster recovery/business continuance and quality of service monitoring. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Fujitsu Softek solutions are backed by the financial strength of Fujitsu Limited.

For more information, please see: http://www.softek.com

About Fujitsu Hong Kong Limited

Fujitsu Hong Kong Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited, has been in operation in Hong Kong since 1986. To further enhance its leading position in services expertise in the region, it was reorganized in 1997 through a strategic merger with International Computer HK Limited (ICL), which is the first computer firm certified with the ISO 9001 standard in Hong Kong. With its strong background in providing mainframe technology in the territory, Fujitsu Hong Kong Limited has evolved herself into a well-established supplier of IT and Telecommunication solutions, Infrastructure systems and services to the customers in China and Hong Kong. It helps government organisations and companies of all sizes, across all industries, in consultation, design, build and implementation of IT&T solutions, offering competitive advantage in the Internet world.

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