I am now fully a week behind in my coverage of my romp through Australia and New Zealand. Last week was "week 2" of the "Tony and Anna" show! This time we were in Auckland, New Zealand. Anna Wells is from New Zealand originally, so it was good for her to be back in her home country.

Sunday I was able to take the Ferry boat to Devonport, and climb to the top of Mt Victoria, which is only 283 feet above sea level, but still affords spectacular views of Auckland from across the harbour. My hotel, the Auckland Heritage, as well as the IBM building, is about a block or two away from the Sky Tower.

New Zealand shares a lot of traits with Australia, including low unemployment and a healthy economy. Employees feel secure enough in their jobs to invest in real estate, get married and start families. School teachers are well-regarded in society, earning six-figure incomes. Retail stores were filled with shoppers spending [disposable and discretionary income]. What a refreshing difference from the United States! The level of optimism made my skin tingle. I had to file a lot of paperwork for all the work permits and visas for this trip, so I hate to think what it would take to emigrate to either country.

(Of course, the grass always appears greener on the other side. Not everything is perfect in New Zealand. I saw warning signs for toxic sea slugs in their beaches, sales advertising for [Brolly Sheets], and the south island of New Zealand suffered a magnitute 7.1 earthquake near Christchurch on the day I arrived to Auckland on the north island. Over 100,000 homes were damaged, but nobody died, and the entire country rallied support to help out those affected.)

I took this photo of a seagull walking along Cheltenham Beach. I thought it might make for a nice wallpaper for my phone or laptop.

The Storage Optimisation Breakfast at this, the fifth of seven cities, went smoothly. The New Zealand client case study she had planned to show was in the middle of an [RFP], so instead she covered [Edith Cowan University] and [Bunnings Warehouse] from Australia as examples of success stories.

Our next speaker was Glen Mitchell, an IT architect in the Operational Integration, Technology & Shared Services of Telecom NZ. The Telecom NZ is New Zealand's phone company, recently split up into separate business units, similar to what the US government did to AT&T during the 1974 [Bell System Divestiture].

The change forced Telecom NZ to be more financially responsible. Before, they were using an all-EMC disk environment, managed by HP Enterprise Services (formerly known as EDS). The EMC gear worked as expected and Telecom NZ is happy with EMC as a vendor, but they were uncomfortable with vendor lock-in. Some firmware upgrades on their EMC boxes often forced them to take outages on hundreds of connected servers to install Powerpath updates. After an EMC disk array went off its four-year prepaid warranty, it took another FOUR YEARS to get all 180 servers migrated to another disk array. Keeping a disk array after warranty expires can cost as much as $450K NZD per year, per disk array, in maintenance fees! Ouch!  This served as a strong motivator to find a way to migrate data from one disk array to another in a more smooth and timely manner.

The new direction was a dual-vendor environment, keeping some of the midrange EMC gear, and getting new IBM high-end DS8700 gear, resulting in a drastically lower TCO. To make the transition as smooth as possible, Telecom NZ employed IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) to virtualize their entire environment, both EMC and IBM happily being part of shared disk pools. They had originally planned to migrate their entire server environment over in 12 months, but in the first six weeks, they are already at 20 percent, ahead of schedule!

The SAN Volume Controllers will also allow Telecom NZ have Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery protection in a consistent manner across both EMC and IBM equipment between their two main data centers in Auckland and Hamilton.

Remember those trees shown in the movie trilogy "Lord of the Rings"? The trees here in New Zealand are amazing! I'm not an arborist, but I was told this one shown here is a [Morton Bay Fig Tree]. Some of the oldest trees in the world live in New Zealand.

By deploying IBM DS8700 and SAN Volume Controller, Telecom NZ was able to reduce costs, manage risk, and improve service delivery!

technorati tags: IBM, Auckland, Devonport, Telecom NZ, HPES, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, EMC, vendor lock-in, price-gouging

Tags:  telecom+nz devonport auckland hpes hewlett-packard eds emc price-gouging vendor+lock-in ibm