BROOMFIELD, Colo., Nov. 8, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- ZIVIT (Center for Information Technology and Processing), the main IT services supplier for the German government, deployed McDATA Corp. (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT) directors and fabric switches to help the Federal Ministry of Finance to store, archive and protect the tax information of nearly 20 million taxpaying entities. The new storage area network (SAN) provides government employees and the ministry's Web site with the information they need to provide more effective customer service to taxpayers and ensure that taxes are paid on time. In addition, invaluable tax information is better protected through a reliable disaster recovery plan, alleviating privacy and regulatory concerns.
ZIVIT storage administrators consolidated hundreds of disparate servers and storage subsystems on a consolidated SAN deployed in two data centers near the company's Bonn campus. By maintaining two data centers and replicating data between facilities, mission-critical tax systems can failover to a sister site should one facility experience downtime. This built-in redundancy further enhances data availability of tax information, maintaining 24-7 business continuity.
"The McDATA directors and fabric switches allow us to deploy a centralized SAN across two data centers without sacrificing performance," said Gunther Fischer, a director for ZIVIT. "This gives us better data protection, and as a result, we simply do not experience any data loss or widespread system failures."
ZIVIT employs more than 400 software developers and 300 services staff to maintain the ministry's IT infrastructure and man a 24-7 user help desk. ZIVIT also manages tax services including an ePayment platform, a form management system, a family benefits payment process and a capital gains tax and corporate tax refund service for 18 million accounts. Reliable data storage, backup and data accessibility is key to keeping these services online as well as arming the ministry's employees with the information they need to provide quality service to taxpayers.
Two McDATA Intrepid 6064 Directors and a series of McDATA Sphereon 4500 Fabric Switches serve as the SAN's backbone, providing a reliable platform where data can be stored, backed up and served to applications seamlessly across the IT infrastructure. McDATA's software management solution allows storage administrators to centrally manage across Fibre Channel and FICON protocols, providing enterprise-level throughput, performance and reliability to both the open systems and mainframe environments while allowing data to be shared between SAP-, Oracle- and MySQL- based applications.
"Collecting tax revenue is one of the most important functions of a federal government, and it needs to be done efficiently," said Adrian Jones, senior vice president of worldwide sales and services, McDATA. "Through reliable and robust data access, McDATA provides the German Federal Ministry of Finance with the information they need for more efficient tax collection while increasing storage resource utilization and improving data protection."
About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)
McDATA (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT) is the leading provider of data access 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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