Storage Pipeline: Review: Out of the Abyss: Page 5 of 8

If virtualization were determined to be required at a later date, a
best-of-breed product could be selected and deployed with full support from the
CA product.

Computer Associates also parted company from the other vendors by making it
clear that Minuteman needed to begin evolving its infrastructure toward a SAN.
Given Minuteman's heavy emphasis on database-centric applications and its
experience with the vicissitudes of Fibre Channel SAN technology, the company
seemed to possess the hard-bitten realism that might make it a good candidate
for expanded use of the topology. This would also facilitate CA's preferred
enterprise-focused data protection and data life-cycle management solution by
providing a multipathing off-LAN interconnection between storage platforms.

There were weaknesses in CA's proposal. For one, the company was fuzzy on the
details of its support for capacity reporting on server-clustered storage. Both
Storability and Fujitsu Softek gave explicit answers that demonstrated they had
encountered and understood the problem. Computer Associates also demonstrated a
lack of willingness to commit to a final price for the solution--or even a
ballpark estimate--without a fact-finding mission. By our calculations, CA's
solution would cost in the neighborhood of $52,000 for software, plus $5,000 per
year for maintenance. The price for implementation services, which could require
several weeks of on-site consulting and training, was undisclosed. Its bid also
omitted pricing for server hardware that Minuteman would have to buy to host
BrightStor Portal, SAN Designer, SAN Manager and Enterprise Backup software.

Taking these costs into consideration, the price would be near or greater
than the price of the Storability solution, which totaled $249,120, with
maintenance, installation and training. Of course, Storability's pricing does
not include some prerequisites, like deployment of Microsoft's Internet
Information Server and a SQL database. It was also unclear how much additional
cost would accrue to Minuteman's election to use the Catalyst Module with
Storability's Global Storage Manager solution.

In the final analysis, Computer Associates edged out Storability because of
the latter vendor's approach to the presentation of the storage infrastructure
on its console. We wanted to see storage presented from the application or
business process perspective to simplify troubleshooting and error resolution.
Storability instead presented storage according to the functions performed by an
administrator. Although useful when providing remote storage services to a
client with many data centers, this function-oriented approach seemed less
applicable to Minuteman's situation.