Monthly Report: 07/19/2000 - 08/18/2000
Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Central Region


1. SUMMARY

A busier month, took care of customers while Fernando had a two-week
vacation.  Fernando has been realigned the accounts, and I move forward
with this change as well, now will focus on the following 5 accounts:
    + Citibank Canada
    + CI Mutual Funds
    + Fidelity Investment of Canada
    + Merrill Lynch Canada
    + Trimark

Got the laptop, it will be convenient for my work. Thanks a lot!

2. Accounts Activities

    + CDS (Canadian Depository of Securities Limited)

     This account is owned by ISO now. I still kept in touch with them,
since they ordered 7 x E420R and 4 x A1000 storage arrays, and lead-time
for shipping was very long, especially for disk arrays which was
supposed to be shipped on July 25, but were delayed to Aug. 21.  During
the transition period, I still worked with ES SIS group Andy and Johnny
and got every details in the installation process.

    + CI Mutual Funds

     StorEdge T3 Array and L700 Tape Library arrived, and T3 has been
unpacked. Talked their system administrator, scheduled time for storage
planning. There will be many activities next next month.

    + Citibank Canada

     A new account for me, visited the customer with Deniela, they are
very nice, and I feel happy to work with them. They are huge Sun shop as
well as HP's. They are interested in Sun's technology such as SunRay,
Instant Image, and StorEdge Network Data Replicator (SNDR), will follow
up all these technique issues.

    + Fidelity Investments

     Worked with E-Business division, moved very quick from our site,
allocated another E450 to their testing lab as application server for
identified key test applications: World-Class (Oracle) and AXIS
(Progress database). I spent a few times at the customer site, set up
the network environment: Netra T1 as SunRay server with 2 appliances and
E450 in another subnet as application server.  They  are going to
migrate their application World Class (Oracle, 27GB) and AXIS (Progress,
45GB) to our testing environment, but they are waiting for 50GB+ disk
drives for the E450 (only has 4x9GB) to host the applications. I checked
with Chris, from our perspective there is not a shortcut for this
requirement at this moment, however, if  they could get the extra disk
drives from their system group, that should be superb. It's an advantage
that they can use their own disk drives, and after the testing, they can
still keep all the sample testing data. 

     Finally it comes to StarPortal project, from our product developing
group, I received the questionnaire and pre-release license  agreement,
so had those forms filled by the customer.

     Thank Peter Pan's great help, we had a meeting with their System
group (UNIX administrators), clarified the key differences between
StorEdge A5X00 (host-based RAID, more suitable for read-intensive
application, OLAP) and A3500FC (controller-based RAID, more suitable for
write-intensive applications, OLTP), both of them are used in the
production systems now.  But they will have a contingency centre
(disaster recovery site) in the near future, so they will realign those
disk arrays, either as primary product system or remote backup system.
Based on suggestion in the meeting, they will use A3500FC which was
purchased in March in their production system, but some benchmark
testing will be conducted in the next weeks for a quantitative approach.

     + Merrill Lynch

     They are evaluating a SNA gateway software to integrate the open
world to the IBM legacy systems (OS/390). They have a free Microsoft NT
SNA gateway software, however, our SunLink SNA gateway is far more
expensive (100K+ for the license). After talking with the engineer in
Menlo Park, I sought help from a company (Datcon) in UK, their product 
(SNAP-IX, 20~30K) is more cost-effective against SunLink SNA. With
Fernando, we will justify the situation to see whether we could get this
opportunity.

     + Morgan Stanley

     This account has also been moved to ISO as well. For their backlog
order, I kept track the order status while Fernando was in vacation, and
followed up all the paperwork when the customer changed the quantity of
parts in the order.


3. TRAINING SUMMARY

     + XML training @WEB2000 in Washing DC. It was  a great trip, and
learned a lot from this conference. When in a suitable time frame, going
to deliver a TOI for the team.


4. Other Activities

     + Met iPlanet alliance engineer, knew each other and will cooperate
for future opportunities.
     + Oracle-Sun pre-sales cross training. I like this event, and will
definitely leverage resource from Oracle.


5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

     + ASM meeting in San Diego
     + CI Mutual: monitor the process of installation of T3 and L700
tape library;
     + Citibank: show SunRay demo, and answer kinds of their technical
research question in storage, application, etc.
     + Fidelity: 
        - Move forward with the SunRay pilot project project, and assist them
when they are migrating their applications. 
        - Will get the StarPortal pre-release software and documentation, will
arrange relevant training in StarPortal for customers (even myself) once
I get required information from the headquarters. 
        - Work their system group, see whether there is any outstanding problem
with existing systems ( check with ES), and follow up their disaster
recovery project to collect storage benchmark data.