'Veritas Solutions Suited to Mergers'
By Okechukwu Kanu
The solutions offered by Veritas through its Nigerian subsidiary, Infoswift have been described as well suited to the needs of banks looking to go into mergers. Veritas Channel Manager, Africa, Mike Rees, said this recently at a press briefing on the growth of the company's Nigerian operations. He said Veritas solutions were able to solve integration problems caused by banks using technologies from several vendors because Veritas made technologies from different hardware vendors work together easily. "Veritas does not have one specific hardware that it aligns itself to," he said. According to him the Veritas customer need not worry about choice of hardware since Veritas worked well with whatever hardware type was introduced.
"We say that's not a challenge for us. That is what we do. We make technology from different hardware vendors work together easily and integrate," Rees said.
Rees also gave advice on what quality of storage the market should go for. Going just for replication was not the right approach, he said.
"It is not good enough just to use empty backup or one of those utilities that come with the application because although they backup the data they don't back it up efficiently and the big challenge is to restore the data efficiently," he said.
He advised companies to pay enough attention to their local site. The disaster-recovery site, he said, was not where whole attention should be focused, especially as it was used only in the case of a serious disaster. According to him, "it's no good having a disaster-recovery site if you have not taken steps to make sure that the site where everybody works from is easily accessible and always available." He said it was only when the main site had been taken care of that attention could be given the off site disaster recovery site, with regards replication. Infoswift, he said, was one of the companies with expertise to advice on how to implement a proper disaster-recovery plan.
"We have successfully implemented the software in a couple of organisations in Nigeria and we are also looking at businesses within West Africa," he said.
Some of the companies using the Veritas solutions for data protection and availability of data include Vmobile and MTN. Infoswift is also conducting assessments for some government organisations so as to help them manage their storage better and implement disaster recovery.
In his own remarks, Veritas Regional Director, Bob Slater, expressed his pleasure with Veritas' partnership with Infoswift. According to him, Veritas and Infoswift, working together were in a very strong position to advice companies on the best way to protect information. The partnership was one that would make sure that information was highly available and applications performing well. He said tcompanies now had the help they needed to run their IT in a better way.
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