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Press Room | Press Releases

Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund Selects DataCore's Storage Networking Software to Manage and Protect Critical Data

SANsymphony Simplifies Data Storage Expansion and Allows Unprecedented Flexibility in Mid-Range SAN Environment

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. (June 28, 2001) -- DataCore™ Software, the leading provider of advanced storage virtualization and networking software, today announced that Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund has joined its expanding customer base. DataCore's SANsymphony™ storage virtualization software reduces the costs and complexities of managing the fund's escalating critical data by consolidating all storage resources into a scalable, virtualized pool.

Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, manages employment data, financial records, eligibility data, and pension distribution for over 300 local unions throughout the country. With more than $4.5 billion in assets and more than 200,000 participants, the fund needed a secure, scalable data solution to manage critical pension information.

The fund's participant growth has been staggering - as more members join and more local unions enroll to leverage the fund's operational efficiencies and expertise, they add to the amount of data that must be kept online. Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund collects and stores data for decades before distributing retirement benefits, requiring a highly scalable, flexible storage environment that can accommodate an ever-increasing amount of data without exponentially increasing costs. To deal with the quickly multiplying gigabytes of data, Bill Manning, director for technical services, previously needed to add and reconfigure server-attached RAID arrays every six months. This operation was slow and laborious, and posed operational risks and costs with each occurrence.

"In the last year, we quadrupled our storage capacity to accommodate the growth and in the next year or two we're expecting to grow five-fold," said Manning. "Knowing what was coming, I knew we had to find something that would work for us as soon as possible. I examined solutions for months, knowing that a storage area network could offer real benefits - if it works. DataCore's SANsymphony was the only solution that could deliver a scalable, simplified approach for managing this growth, without locking us to any single hardware vendor or storage technology."

Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund worked with Vienna, Virginia-based integrator, Selenetix Corporation, to conduct stress tests, disable components on the fly, monitor and redirect I/O, and add and move storage volumes using a 'Powered by DataCore' storage network before implementing it. The solution proved worthy on all fronts. With SANsymphony consolidating the company's data storage into a virtualized pool, Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund can now seamlessly expand and manage the company's storage resources, allocating appropriately sized virtual volumes of capacity as needed with just a simple drag-and-drop.

SANsymphony's vendor-agnostic approach gives the fund a flexible architecture with the ability to incorporate existing hardware investments as well as leverage new technologies. With complete data redundancy and system monitoring tools that redirect I/O transactions, the software offers high levels of data protection in a cost-effective architecture. Also, SANsymphony's remote mirroring and snapshot technology features eliminated the fund's eight-hour backups, allowing pension analysts 24x7 access to the records.

"Companies of all sizes struggle with exponential data growth and in today's economy, they are under ever-increasing pressure to maximize ROI and lower operational costs," said Ken Horner, vice president of marketing at DataCore. "Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund needed highly available data access without being locked into expensive, proprietary solutions that are incompatible with enterprise legacy systems. DataCore addresses this need with a solution that sets the standard for economical, flexible and secure data storage management."

First Solution for Managing Storage in Multi-Vendor Environments
SANsymphony is the first available software-based solution to pool networked storage from multi-vendor platforms, allowing network administrators to distribute available volumes from mixed storage devices within the virtualized pools and serve capacity to any application server on an as-needed basis. SANsymphony delivers an immediate ROI by freeing staff from time-consuming reconfigurations, eliminating business disruption and allowing administrators to get the most out of hardware resources.

SANsymphony ensures enterprise-level data protection through a fault-tolerant architecture that eliminates single points of failure and offers advanced security for network-wide management and control of storage assets, while leveraging sophisticated caching to improve throughput and network performance. SANsymphony allows companies to distribute storage simply and non-disruptively to Unix, Windows, Linux, Mac OS and NetWare servers.

About DataCore Software
DataCore™ Software Corporation is the leader in storage virtualization and networking software. The Company's SANsymphony™ storage infrastructure software converts `islands' of disparate storage into networked storage pools, enabling the easy allocation of storage capacity on an as-needed basis, using a simple 'drag-and-drop' interface. Now administrators can move these 'virtual' volumes among different servers - regardless of the underlying operating system. DataCore distributes its software products through channel and OEM partners worldwide. Founded in 1998 by some of the industry's most respected storage technologists, DataCore is headquartered in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., with subsidiaries and branch offices worldwide. For more information, call (877) 780-5111 or visit www.datacore.com.

DataCore, the DataCore Logo, and SANsymphony are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation.

All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Corporate Contact:
DataCore Software Corporation
(954) 377-6000
pr@datacore.com

Media Contacts:
(954) 377-6000
pr@datacore.com

Kendra Balcius
(760) 758-8002
kbalcius@corporateink.com