BROOMFIELD, Colo., July 25, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- More than 70,000 students in Ontario, Canada's Durham District have reliable access to their school work now that the School Board has successfully consolidated 109 Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) systems into a single McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT) Storage Area Network (SAN). The centralized SAN simplifies management and improves data access, reducing the possibility of lost or late assignments since files and learning software are available anytime computer labs are open.
"The real benefit is that teachers can now rely on technology as a teaching tool, leveraging educational software in science, math, reading and multi-media classes," said Wilson Chan, manager of technical services for the school board. "They don't have to worry about systems being down during class or after school."
The Durham District School Board worked with services solution partner CONPUTE to consolidate the systems. Two McDATA 4Gb/s 4700 Fabric Switches facilitate the flow of data between more than 135 facilities across the region to a central data center. Two McDATA 4500 Fabric Switches connect the network to an IBM tape library for backup and recovery. The completely redundant network ensures systems availability. If one node goes down then the other will automatically pick up the slack until the problem is diagnosed and corrected.
Migration to a single SAN also saves time for the IT staff. Before the migration, administrators had to drive to each school to diagnose outages, troubleshoot problems and fix configuration or networking errors. With drive times of up to an hour in each direction, it was possible for schools to experience day-long outages. Now, all management is done centrally at one data center, which coupled with the redundant architecture, virtually eliminates downtime.
"Consolidated SANs are definitely the way to go when setting up and managing a metropolitan network that spans a large geographic region," said Gary Gysin, Sr. vice president, worldwide sales and service, McDATA. "Centralized monitoring not only eases considerable management pain, but improves application performance, systems availability and data protection for end users."
About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)
McDATA (NASDAQ Global Select: MCDTA/MCDT) is the leading provider of storage networking solutions, helping customers build, globally connect, optimize and centrally manage data infrastructures across SAN, MAN and WAN environments. With nearly 25 years experience developing SAN products, services and solutions, McDATA is the trusted partner in the world's largest data centers, connecting more than two-thirds of all networked data.
Forward-Looking Statements
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