Beverly Hills Relies on McDATA Professional Services for Disaster Recovery Planning

Business Wire, Nov 15, 2005

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT), a leading provider of storage networking solutions, today announced the IT department for the city of Beverly Hills used McDATA's Professional Services organization to augment and upgrade their disaster recovery plan. The city's fire, police and public works departments rely on access to their critical systems -- such as emergency response dispatch, wireless network access in police cars, demographic and structural schematics -- and non-critical systems, including library catalogue, civic Web site, parks and recreation data, especially in the case of a disaster. With these departments increasingly relying on technology, the city needed help planning and implementing a reliable disaster recovery plan that decentralized the city's critical data and allowed the staff to restore lost data more quickly in case of downtime.

"Beverly Hills is home to 35,000 people and hosts more than 200,000 commuters, shoppers and tourists daily," said Keone Kali, IT director for Beverly Hills. "Our IT infrastructure supports everything from Microsoft Office files, to 911 emergency response calls, to wireless devices in our police and fire vehicles. We rely on technology to do our jobs, so the city council needed to be assured that a contingency plan is in place. We worked with McDATA to implement a reliable disaster recovery plan to protect systems in the event of a disaster or any other form on unplanned downtime."

Together, McDATA consultants and city management identified critical and non-critical systems and classified the city's data. Using this information, they developed a plan to reduce restore time by deploying a second data center that could function on its own should the main site be damaged or rendered unusable. To maximize recoverability while minimizing capital expenditures, McDATA consultants recommended the city decentralize its data center, splitting the infrastructure between sites and shifting resources between the two if needed.

"By working with McDATA's Professional Services organization, the city of Beverly Hills evaluated their infrastructure and then created a disaster recovery plan designed to protect critical data and systems while leveraging existing infrastructure," said Costa Hasapopoulos, vice president of technical solutions for McDATA. "Their new disaster recovery plan is expected to increase reliability and availability of the city's emergency response systems in case of a disaster or virus attack, and also result in less downtime for all IT systems in the event of maintenance, configuration or new deployment."

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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