Storage Growth Market

Technologent uses Sun Storage 7000 applications to help customers manage their fast-growing data resource.

Revenues are down and uncertainty about the economy is on the rise in both industry and government. In the face of these difficult times, Sun Executive partner Technologent has put together a unique consulting services offering, built around the Sun Storage 7000 platform, that is proving investments in advanced, open IT solutions can be the key to controlling costs and overcoming economic adversity.

"Times are tough," says Marco Mohajer, executive vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Professional Services at Technologent. "Companies are pulling back on expenditures, but they can't cut storage. The fact is, [organizational] data doubles every 12 to 18 months. Storage is one of the few growth markets in IT right now. But customers need to be able manage their data more effectively and at the lowest possible cost. They want high performance and they demand a fast payback on their investment."

Right time, right solution — Sun Storage 7000 System

Mohajer is convinced that this Sun network-attached storage (NAS) solution is the ideal platform for serving up and supporting data associated with strategic Web 2.0, virtualization, high-performance computing (HPC), and database applications. So much so that he's focusing the company's new-business efforts around the Sun Storage 7000 Server.

Taking the next step

To help organizations see and take advantage of the performance, ongoing cost reduction, simplicity, and quick payback they can enjoy with the new Sun unified storage system, Technologent has developed a two-stage consulting engagement — that's free of charge to qualified customers.

The first part of the engagement is a two-hour assessment session. Next, depending on the needs identified, comes a more in-depth six-hour workshop. Following are the session highlights.

• Two-hour assessment: The session opens by mapping the customer's business issues and challenges to specific open storage capabilities. Open storage best practices are discussed, followed by strategies for incorporating new storage technologies into legacy environments. The session wraps up with an overview of the latest technology and IT industry trends.


• Six-hour workshop: This session features a deeper, quantitative analysis of the customer's storage capabilities, processes, and storage infrastructure management — with the goal of devising a plan of action to improve reliability, utilization, and performance of disk, tape, and storage area network (SAN) systems. Recommendations take into consideration potential cost and other advantages of migrating to virtualized server and storage implementations.

What sparked this idea?

"These are the times," says Mohajer, "when you double your focus on where you think growth is going to happen. We took a look around and realized storage is the only growth engine in the market today. Because it's a necessity, not a luxury."

That analysis may seem a bit simplistic to some, but Mohajer points out that the answers to complex business issues are often straightforward — at least to him and his team of Sun technologists. For example, he says, "most companies just aren't capitalizing on existing technologies to gain the efficiencies they require to compete effectively in today's economy."

Elaborating on this theme of "simple fixes" for business problems, Mohajer mentions a call he received recently from a customer contact at a Fortune 50 manufacturer. "He told me his company had a new directive to cut IT costs by 10 to 15 percent across the board. Consequently, he wanted me and all of his suppliers to automatically knock 15 percent off all our invoices in the future. That was his proposal." Taking a different tack, Mohajer quickly but deftly explained to his customer how consolidating the company's hundreds of dispersed HP and IBM servers and centralizing virtualized applications on fewer, more powerful Sun servers would easily accomplish the desired 10 to 15 percent savings — in the form of reduced power, cooling, administration, and maintenance costs. "And provide a six-month payback on top of that."

Sun partner advantage

With locations throughout the West, Southwest, and Southeastern United States, Technologent provides integrated datacenter, storage, virtualization, and training solutions built around advanced, open Sun technologies. Technologent's senior management team, in fact, possesses about 75 years of collective Sun experience.

To bolster its Sun business portfolio, Technologent focuses 70 percent of its 100-person inside sales and technical team exclusively on Sun solutions. The company's Sun technologists include 16 systems engineers and 12 sales engineers.

So, what is Mohajer's outlook for the future? He's bullish, paying no mind to the prevailing gloom and doom, or even to the Dow: "I'm going on a hiring binge," he says. "I just can't find enough good people."

Get Started

• To discuss qualifications for the open storage assessment, call (888) 387-8001.
• Technologent webinar: March 19, 2009:
  Uncover the technical secrets of Sun's new unified storage appliance.
• Technologent storage solutions:
  Read about Technologent's open storage practice.
• Find out more about the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems.