Planning for Growth First Union Corp., the nation's sixth-largest bank, faces similar issues. Mass.-based EMC Corp. The Control Center software that comes with the EMC hardware is Fox's primary management tool, and he says the amount of time and effort required to support the Unix server storage has decreased. But management across all enterprise storage systems is still lacking. Raju Palnitkar, vice president of enterprise server systems, says he saw the move to one homogeneous system as the best choice to get a handle on storage management. Six EMC Connectrix switches provide the interoperability among the bank's servers, according to Palnitkar.
Several people spend the equivalent of two full-time jobs managing storage.
But the EMC tools don't give us all of the flexibility we need. We still need to get EMC involved in some of the changes. The company built what Wardrip describes as a mainframelike storage model. We were concerned about interoperability. We felt like if we went with a single vendor, then they had some responsibility for what they sold.