BROOMFIELD, Colo., Sept. 26, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT), a leading provider of data access solutions, announced today that a large national bank chose McDATA Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solutions to improve the reliability of backed up data on the corporate network while reducing its reliance on physical storage resources. As a result of the solution, the bank is better able to provide account information to customer service representatives, improve backup and restore performance and save more than $15 million per year on media, bandwidth and management.
In an industry when customer service calls are measured in seconds rather than minutes, data accessibility is vital to ensuring quality customer service. By providing customer-facing employees with seamless and fast access to account information, banks can ensure a good customer experience and build consumer trust. However, prior to the McDATA VTL deployment, the IT staff could not guarantee access to up-to-date information or that the backed up data was consistent across facilities. It was apparent that the bank needed to increase the performance of its backup and data access systems.
"Purchasing additional equipment such as new arrays and servers would have been too great a cost to be worth the upgrade," said the director of IT for the bank. "We knew that we had to find a creative way to make our backup systems more efficient and meet our data protection needs. Thankfully, McDATA's expertise in Virtual Tape Library solutions gave us that capability."
Previously, the bank relied on physical tape and disk libraries to support its mission-critical back up and recovery solution. However, due to the large volume of data created and changed by the employees each day, backup windows were excessively long and often resulted in failed cycles. McDATA professional services re-engineered the IT architecture with VTL solutions in each of the bank's five regional data centers. Instead of backing up to physical storage -- usually a major expenditure in any IT budget -- data would be backed up to virtual resources, a more cost efficient medium. Data is now automatically replicated between sites through the virtual network, and then backed up on tape in the bank's remote disaster recovery site. For further data protection and fast throughput speeds, McDATA based the virtual network on its UltraNet Edge 3000 Storage Routers.
In addition to being more consistent, backups are completed faster across the more efficient media, going from 7-10 Mb/s to 30-35 Mb/s for backups and 3 Mb/s to 30 Mb/s for restore. As a result, backups now take hours less to complete than the previous half-a-day backup window. This frees up computing and human resources for other systems and allows the bank to restore lost data 10 times faster in case of disaster, system error or site outages.
"Access to information is the cornerstone to providing quality customer service in the banking industry," said Adrian Jones, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales and Services , McDATA. "We knew that our customer needed to improve the performance of its backup system in order to meet customer expectations and industry regulations. Going virtual was a cost-effective and more efficient way to protect this critical data."
About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)
McDATA (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq: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.
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