Much is written about the intended business benefits of many products on the market with special attention lately to anything that will help businesses lower costs.  The real results are when customers can share HOW they accomplish this with real-life examples.

Continental Airlines is a great example of this.  Their Finance Group using HP Data Protector software to backup and recover over a petabyte of data points to a 70% reduction in technology costs.  They also have been able to reduce the business risks associated with compliance and government regulations.

According to Continental, "Information security, virtualization, compliance and e-discovery are critical areas for us moving into 2009. We expect further benefits with the new virtualization and encryption features in the latest version of HP Data Protector."

But the really interesting real-life use case becomes clear when you talk to the Senior Manager responsible for the deployment of Data Protector, Devin York.  Devin takes advantage of the plethora of reports available to him in the product to forecast hardware purchases, capacity plan for storage, determine performance bottlenecks and identify database growth trends.  This critical data is not only used by Devin in his day to day job but for the important yearly task of forecasting and budget planning.

To read all the details of how Devin uses these reports to answer almost any question he gets from his boss, an executive or a customer, check out his story at:
http://h41112.www4.hp.com/promo/imhub/imheroes/bios/devin-york.html