USDA picks storage management suite

The Agriculture Department's National Finance Center has selected a storage

management software package from Amdahl Corp. to help it copy, move and

store its immense amount of financial data, the USDA announced Tuesday.

The USDA will use Amdahl's Transparent Data Migration Facility package

to manage the data flowing through the four IBM Corp. mainframe computers

at the finance center's New Orleans location. The agency purchased a perpetual

license that it can use across all of its mainframes.

The price of the TDMF package ranges from $26,882 to almost $1 million,

depending on a user's configuration. Installation can be completed in a

matter of hours because it's a software-based solution, which is easily

scaled using the USDA's existing mainframe hardware.

The data replication and migration solution enables users to move data

across multiple vendors' hardware without disrupting any other applications,

said Steven Murphy, president of Amdahl's software division. "TDMF provides

organizations like [the] USDA with solutions to improve their operating

efficiencies, while at the same time providing peace of mind by increasing

data availability," Murphy said.

TDMF is used also by federal agencies including the Library of Congress,

the Senate, the Federal Reserve and the Defense Information Systems Agency.