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CentricStor VIRTUAL TAPE APPLIANCE LAUNCHED IN U.S. MARKET

CentricStor, a powerful, heterogeneous virtual tape system previously available only in Europe and Asia, was launched for the U.S. market by PeakData Inc, a Colorado-based storage solutions provider. CentricStor is developed by Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the leading European IT provider. The announcement was made at Storage World Conference 2004 in Long Beach, Calif.

CentricStor is the first and only self-contained, heterogeneous virtual tape system that supports the predominant operating system environments and back-up applications as well as major tape automation platforms and tape devices from such prominent companies as StorageTek, ADIC and IBM.

CentricStor enables today's complex data centers to consolidate their tape environments onto fewer real tape devices and tape libraries while shrinking backup windows and dramatically reducing data recovery times. The net result is a less capital and resource intensive environment that saves money and time and reduces business risk.

CentricStor has been in use in Europe since 2000. It was introduced in late 2003 in the Asia/Pacific region by Fujitsu Ltd There are now some 150 CentricStor systems installed in more than 11 countries worldwide. PeakData, Inc. is launching the product in the United States with the help of a network of value added resellers.

"Consolidation remains a powerful theme in data center environments as organizations struggle to deal with exploding information and the need to better protect and more quickly recover that information while at the same time maintaining strict control over capital and operational costs," said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner with Data Mobility Group. "Tape virtualization is becoming an increasingly popular means of addressing a substantial portion of that challenge. CentricStor, a product with a solid track record, is a welcome entrant into the U.S. market for that purpose."

"CentricStor represents the best possible combination of capabilities in the market, which is why PeakData is so excited to be bringing this technology to the United States through our network of resellers," said Mike Holland, vice president of marketing and general manager of the CentricStor business unit for PeakData Inc. "Our company has had substantial experience selling virtual tape systems and we believe there is no other tape virtualization product with CentricStor's performance, scalability, flexibility and ease of installation and operation."

"CentricStor has proven its value to customers throughout Europe over the past three years," said Helmut Beck, vice president Storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "We now believe it is the right time and we also believe we have the right partner in PeakData to bring this outstanding storage solution to customers in the U.S."

PeakData's first U.S. customer is the Orange County Public School System in Orlando, Fla., one of the country's 20 largest school systems with over 160,000 students and 23,000 employees.

"We had been looking for quite some time for a heterogeneous virtual tape solution that would consolidate our tape environment, enabling us to save cost while at the same time facilitating a migration from our legacy environment in the future," said Darryl Zietlow, manager of storage and systems for the school system. "We had all but given up hope when CentricStor came along."

"We have now been able to consolidate a wide variety of dozens of older tape devices, including mainframe, DLT (Digital Linear Tape) and 4MM (4 Millimeter) tape to a single, automated tape environment employing a StorageTek tape library and four LTO drives. At the same time we have reduced our tape media from over 7,000 cartridges to fewer than 500. We calculate that the operational savings will pay for the system in less than 12 months. More important, we have been able to incorporate all our systems, including our legacy mainframes, into the CentricStor environment and now have a smooth migration path for our systems and applications in the future without concern for the tape devices and media behind them," he added.