Y2K: Legato Systems Announces Year 2000 Contingency Planning Toolkit; Toolkit Addresses Recovery for Any Natural or Human Disaster - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Oct 12, 1998

Legato Systems, Inc., a leader in the enterprise storage management software market, Monday announced the availability of a toolkit to assist customers in creating a Year 2000 contingency plan for business continuance.

The toolkit consists of a Year 2000 Contingency Planning white paper, Legato GEMS Reporter software (to be announced next week), and Legato's Consulting Services. The toolkit is designed to ensure enterprise-wide data protection and data availability in the event of any natural or human disaster. A contingency plan is crucial to corporate data availability, as complete data protection for the year 2000 may not be addressed by software products and testing intended to provide Y2K compliancy.

In a recent survey of 250 CIOs, InformationWeek reported that 88 percent of the respondents believe they will fix only 76 percent of the datefield bugs before the millenium. Of those surveyed, only one in four of them have completed contingency plans. The risks and possible legal ramifications to companies that do not find all the datefield bugs are significant. With critical data storage information and careful planning, a disaster can be averted and business continuance insured.

"Few corporate IT operations don't need help dealing with Y2K or data protection issues," said Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corporation, Santa Barbara, California. "Here is an innovative approach that should be a fundamental building block of any good data protection and contingency planning program. This really makes sense!"

"The key to insuring data protection is the execution of a complete and tested contingency plan," said Kent Smith, chief operating officer at Legato Systems, Inc. "Legato is committed to providing its customers software and professional services that will assist in creating a plan to ensure easy retrieval of lost data, and the recovery of business-critical systems in the event of a disaster."

The Year 2000 Contingency Planning white paper provides customers with a step-by-step procedure that can be used in any organization to enhance readiness for any natural or human disaster. Successful data protection begins with assessing and prioritizing business-critical applications and data to ensure proper functionality. Creating a contingency plan that identifies the business-critical applications, and a procedure for their recovery, is the next logical step.

Legato offers key components essential in creating a successful contingency plan. These components consist of storage management software for backup and recovery, reports that provide critical information on backup and recovery, and audits to enable backup repair when necessary. Legato's Professional Services ensure that a customer's data zones are working effectively, evaluate and set-up new backup configurations, and help audit customer reports and operations. Two consulting packages, Optimization Discovery Phase and Storage Health Check, have been introduced to address specific needs of contingency plan creation.

"In our work to date with enterprise customers, we have found a surprisingly large number who, because of the natural growth of networks and applications, don't have all their critical data protected," said Mark Diamond, director of Worldwide Professional Services at Legato Systems, Inc. "They don't discover that the data isn't being backed up correctly until they have a situation that requires recovery."

In response to this, Legato has developed a number of Professional Services packages which provide a step-by-step procedure to discover and analyze potential backup and recovery problems and create a data zone improvement plan to ensure that customers can recover their data in the event of a year 2000 problem.

Pricing and Availability The Legato Year 2000 Contingency Planning white paper is free of charge. Introductory pricing for the Legato GEMS Reporter is $1,000. Legato Professional Services are provided at an average cost of $2,000 per day. FMI: (650) 812-6000, or via e-mail at sales@legato.com.

Legato Systems, Inc. develops, markets, and supports an integrated set of enterprise storage management software products for heterogeneous client/server computing environments. Large customers around the world select the Company's solution because of its reliability, platform independence, and unique ability to seamlessly integrate with existing and future computing environments. Legato's storage management software has become the recognized defacto standard with the largest installed base, representing over 37,000 customers, protecting more than 4,000,000 systems. 24 of the world's largest system and applications vendors have chosen Legato's software as their preferred storage management solution for their customers, including Banyan, BMC Software, Compaq/Digital, Compaq/Tandem, Data General, Fujitsu/Amdahl, Fujitsu/ICL, Groupe Bull, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Informix, NEC, Netscape, Network Appliance, Nihon-Unisys, Oracle, Siemens Nixdorf, Silicon Graphics, Sony and Sun Microsystems. The company's NetWorker, BusinesSuite, and GEMS products are also licensed, resold, or endorsed by other major vendors, including Computer Associates, IBM/Tivoli, Microsoft Corporation, MTI, Novell, and SAP. Legato's home page address on the World Wide Web is http://www.legato.com.