Mark Latchford: VP for systems and technology IBM Australia/New Zealand
Steven Bovis: Director of servers and storage HP South Pacific
Bovis
What would IBM recommend as the key elements required to provide customers with a total management solution?
Latchford
A total management solution should enable the IT organisation to deliver quality IT services to its clients—the right range of services meeting the required business service levels, at the planned cost. This needs to cover the full IT lifecycle from the integration of processes and information, through business-driven application development and effective IT service management.
A good management solution must help the IT department implement effective IT processes to secure and manage access to corporate data, monitor and manage the availability of business applications and deliver agreed performance and service levels to end users. It must also support the IT organisation in selecting the right people for the right jobs, and ensure they have the skills, knowledge and resources needed to perform the required services. It will also provide the appropriate tools to help automate the IT processes, enable the IT staff to perform their role efficiently and integrate all the activities needed to deliver an end-to-end serviceincorporating user experience and business application availability.
Latchford
IDC recently recommended vendors approach the small and medium business (SMB) market by bundling software with hardware. With its limited software range how does HP plan to compete with IBM’s software and hardware offerings to make doing business easier for SMBs?
Bovis
We believe SMBs are in fact looking for end-to-end solutions including servers, storage, services, PCs, printers, ISV and channel partnerships. IBM is clearly unable to cover the breadth of these requirements. For example, it does not offer printing, PCs or software solutions specifically targeted to meet the needs of SMB customers today.
HP, together with partners, provides solutions to address all of these categories, and more SMBs buy our HP product solutions than those of any other vendor. Of course software bundling is critical for SMBs and HP’s strategy is to package and market a range of SMB solutions at appropriate pricing to meet different sized SMB’s needs. In this sense it is vital for any vendor to realise that SMBs are not just a market category, and they most likely operate with just a small group of people in charge.
Bovis
What would you recommend to organisations wanting to implement an effective culture of data backup and security?
Latchford
When looking to implement data backup and security policies it is more important to look at the problem from a “restore” perspective rather than from a “backup” perspective. The two most important considerations are recovery time objective (RTO—the maximum amount of time to perform the restore operation) and recovery point objective (RPO—how up-to-date data is once recovery is complete).
Different organisations and applications within an organisation will have different RPO and RTO requirements. For some applications RTO and RPO times are not critical and traditional tape based daily backups may be suitable. Other applications will have RTO and RPO requirements of close to zero, for which an approach using higher-cost storage is likely to be required. High levels of automation are important so that backups are performed in accordance with company requirements and are not seen as a daily chore.
As technology costs decrease, especially for communications technology, techniques that provide higher levels of automation and lower RTO and RPO are becoming increasingly easy to justify. For example, 10 years ago electronic vaulting of backup data (the sending of copy of backup to a remote site electronically rather than by removable media) was limited to very large organisations and typically only for critical applications. Today smaller organisations are able to take advantage of this technique, often for all
backup data.
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