Benefits Administration Service Provider TRI-AD Selects EqualLogic IP SAN Array to Secure Its Future

Business Wire, May 24, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NASHUA, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2004

EqualLogic's Storage Consolidation Solution Dramatically Increased Capacity, Manageability and Reliability While Providing for Future Growth

EqualLogic(R), Inc., a leading provider of iSCSI-based, self-managing networked storage solutions, today announced its customer TRI-AD has migrated to a consolidated storage environment using EqualLogic's PeerStorage Array 100E as the core of its storage area network (SAN). TRI-AD has realized significant cost and time reductions from using EqualLogic's PeerStorage architecture, and the company is now able to backup data instantly and provision storage capacity to its employees and clients on demand.

TRI-AD is a full-service benefits design and administration firm, recognized as one of the largest benefits service providers headquartered in Southern California, providing both health and welfare and retirement consulting and administration services. TRI-AD's clients need continual access to the company's data around the clock, placing great demands on the company's data-storage infrastructure. TRI-AD needed to migrate from its direct-attached storage to a more flexible, higher capacity storage solution that would deliver high availability and reliability and selected EqualLogic's PeerStorage array.

"Our clients are constantly accessing our benefits data from the Web and demand instant access, which is a large undertaking for our IT department," said Stephen Greenlee, IT director for TRI-AD. "We required a storage solution that would allow us complete flexibility and easy management, while also improving our backup and recovery processes. EqualLogic's PeerStorage technology is allowing us to stop worrying about our storage environment and focus on our applications, business processes and various service departments while integrating them at a much higher level."

EqualLogic has given TRI-AD a cost-effective solution that easily integrates into its existing infrastructure and is fully interoperable with other network vendors. TRI-AD's IT administrators now can quickly set up additional arrays and allocate storage capacity instantly to existing volumes with no network or application downtime. EqualLogic's new standard auto-replication capabilities offer key functionality for TRI-AD, as the company plans to create a new disaster recovery plan using PeerStorage arrays. TRI-AD is also evaluating EqualLogic for other projects that include creating a document management system and an archive data environment.

"TRI-AD used to spend a significant amount of time each week managing its storage, from performing backups to allocating storage to archiving information, and EqualLogic was able to help them bring that down to virtually zero time," said John Joseph, vice president of marketing for EqualLogic. "TRI-AD is another example of EqualLogic's commitment to helping customers realize the benefits of self-managing, consolidated storage environments."

EqualLogic is the only IP SAN solution provider to offer a comprehensive and fully integrated standard feature set at no additional cost to the customer. Each PeerStorage Array 100E supports 3.5 terabytes of storage capacity, comes with fully redundant fault-tolerant hardware and includes full-featured automatic storage-management software. Up to 32 arrays can be combined to form a scalable enterprise storage grid of more than 100 terabytes.

About EqualLogic

PeerStorage(TM) solutions from EqualLogic(R), Inc. deliver the benefits of consolidated storage in a modular, self-managing, IP-based storage area network that is affordable and easy to use, regardless of scale. By eliminating complex tasks and enabling fast and flexible storage provisioning, PeerStorage solutions dramatically reduce acquisition and ongoing operational costs and make enterprise class shared block storage practical for the mid-range storage market. EqualLogic is based in Nashua, NH. For more information visit http://www.equallogic.com/ or http://www.peerstorage.com/

About TRI-AD

Headquartered in Escondido, California, TRI-AD is a benefits consulting and administration service provider for online benefits enrollment, flexible spending accounts, COBRA administration, retirement plans and employee opinion surveys. For more information, visit www.tri-ad.com. Media contact: Diane Cohen, 760-705-3003, dcohen@tri-ad.com.

EqualLogic and PeerStorage are trademarks or registered trademarks of EqualLogic, Inc. Other marks belong to their respective owners.