Analysis

posted on 24 April 2008 13:07

Copan has opened an office in Beijing and expanded its professional services consulting offer.

The Beijing office is the second one that Copan has opened in the region in the last six months. It will enable Copan to provide a better and more localised level of service to its customers, forge new strategic partner alliances and position it to capitalise on the growing demand for long-term, persistent data storage products worldwide.

Chinese partner alliances gained so far include integrated IT service provider and value-added reseller Beijing Teamsun Technology Co., Ltd. and Satellite communication and MSC software system integrator LSSA Technology Limited which is an accredited Gold Partner in the region.

Mark Ward, Copan's CEO, said: "Expanding our presence in APAC is integral to our success as a business. With existing offices in Singapore and Japan - and nine others outside the APJ region – we chose Beijing as our next base as it will enable us to provide a greater, more localised level of service to our customers, forge new strategic partner alliances and position us to capitalise on the growing demand for persistent data storage solutions across the globe."

Copan is poised to announce the opening of its Korean office in later this month.

New Consulting Service

Copan's Professional Services Division has launched a new Persistent Data Assessment Service (PDAS) to help customers understand where their most frequently accessed files reside, how much persistent data they have, and what kind of medium it resides on. Copan can then transition the data to its Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disk) platform which will improve storage utilisation. Copan says there is a massive green benefit as well; power consumption, cooling costs and footprint for this data can be reduced by up to 85 percent.

The background to this is that potential customers may not appreciate how much data on their primary storage does not actually need to be there. The Enterprise Storage Group estimates that 60 - 85 percent of the data sitting on primary systems is non-transactional or post-transactional - half of which is a copy of non-transactional data.

Steve Duplessie of the ESG Group said: “The costs of keeping this type of persistent data on primary storage systems can be huge. Primary disk is more expensive to acquire, manage, maintain and power. By moving data off expensive primary storage systems and onto lower-cost SATA-based secondary storage systems, organisations can significantly reduce capital and operational costs while continuing to ensure high availability, security and quick access to data.”

The PDAS audit and analysis typically takes under a week for most customers. It's an unobtrusive approach in which Copan software is deployed on a customer-hosted central server to automatically discover existing data and storage resources. The results are presented to the customer with a set of recommendations.

Carl Elliott, Copan's global senior director of professional services, said: "The Persistent Data Assessment Service is the first step customers can take to effectively control and manage their existing and future persistent data. Not only can we quantify and personalise the extent of persistent data, but we can do something about it by proposing a different way of managing and storing this data with our purpose-build Enterprise MAID platform." 

Elliot joined Copan nine months ago  to build its Professional Services Division which has recently expanded in North America, Asia Pacific, Japan and EMEA. Before Copan Elliot worked at EMC, where he built the Professional Services organisation across EMEA, developed a partner services function, and built vertical market propositions. Ha has also led a European -ide consulting initiative with Accenture.

What all this says to me is that Copan is seriously and steadily building up its operation and aiming at enterprise-level customers. The maid is coming of age.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}