Voice of Experience: Rich Guetzloff, R.R. Donnelley

Rich Guetzloff
R.R. Donnelley
Senior Director, Enterprise Operations
Chicago
www.rrdonnelley.com

Manager’s Profile: Guetzloff oversees enterprise infrastructure for the $4.8 billion printing-services company. That includes keeping mainframe-based printing manufacturing applications humming, and watching over 800 or so client/server applications, 12,000 desktop systems and more than 1,000 servers at 120 sites.

What R.R. Donnelley Did: When retaining a company to host his client/server systems, Guetzloff demanded that the host use Veritas for networked backup, file recovery and journaling, storage performance and other tasks.

His Other Option? Because the client/server systems run EMC Clarion, he could have tried to negotiate a discounted price to bundle the hardware with EMC software.

Why the Higher-Priced Option? “We wanted to look at a more agnostic tool because we’re not likely to use EMC hardware everywhere. And we don’t want to be dependent on the proprietary nature of software that’s tied to hardware. The challenge with hardware vendors is that they’re not focused just on software … Veritas, I have to pay for, so they damn well better make sure it works.”

Has He Gotten What He Paid For? “[Veritas’] file manager allows us to allocate disk-on-demand for our customers. The entire process takes 15 minutes. Prior to using this product, it took an outage and several hours.” Other benefits: Backup is faster, as is throughput, the rate at which data is stored and retrieved.