University of Texas Medical Branch Selects COPAN Systems Revolution 200T to Deliver Faster, More Reliable Backup and Disaster Recovery for Mission-Critical Medical Data

Business Wire, Oct 4, 2005

LONGMONT, Colo. -- MAID-Based Platform Enables Organization with More than 12,000 Employees to Reduce Nightly Backups to less than 5 Hours and Reduce Administration Costs by More than 50%

COPAN Systems, a leading provider of complete storage solutions that unlock the value of long-term data, today announced that the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, an organization with more than 12,000 employees, has implemented COPAN Systems' Revolution 200T to achieve reliable and dramatically faster backup/recovery of patient, financial and academic data. COPAN Systems' MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks)-based platform provides today's cutting edge Fortune 1000 enterprises with a stable, cost-effective, nearline storage platform that offers significant business advantage through faster, more reliable backup/recovery and archive of long-term data.

Established in 1891, UTMB is a major academic medical center on the Gulf Coast dedicated to health science education, patient care, research and community service. The organization needed a storage solution that would integrate quickly and seamlessly into their IT environment to provide faster, more reliable backup and recovery of critical data.

"No one wants to tell their staff that their data couldn't be restored, and when they need it, they need it ASAP. Giving our staff fast and reliable access to data in a world where loss of data can cripple a medical facility is a necessary and critical element of our IT infrastructure," said Matt Johnson, Senior Software Systems Specialist at UTMB. "Through our rigorous review process, COPAN's Revolution 200T's ease of integration, low cost, and small footprint made it an easy choice."

Prior to implementing the COPAN Systems solution, UTMB experienced backup hardware failures, fiber channel communication loss, and slow access to data in time-sensitive conditions. One failure would create a domino effect that would fail all backups through a particular night and into the next day. In addition, complications in locating tapes and bringing them in from off-site increased restore time. UTMB found that a tape library solution would be an insufficient and temporary solution at best, and the size of the tape library needed would have made the cost prohibitive.

Once selected, the Revolution 200T was implemented in just three months. The system is used to backup over 300 non-SAN-attached servers containing financial, academic and patient data, and currently manages 60 usable terabytes. UTMB has ordered an additional 40 Terabytes to enable three months of both full and incremental backups on hand.

"The most important benefit has been faster, more reliable backups and restores - previously it took us a full night and into the next day's business hours, and now it takes only 4.5 hours," continued Johnson of UTMB. "And we've experienced no failures due to hardware malfunction. A side benefit is the dramatically increased restore speed. It's also easier to administer, so we've reduced the staff devoted to hardware failures by 50% and the overall administration of the backup and restore process requires just one person."

UTMB still archives to tape as part of their disaster recovery procedures. But having a larger amount of restorable data on-hand means that the Information Services group does not have to pull off-site tapes to perform a restore. This saves UTMB time and in turn, gets the data back to UTMB's end users almost instantly.

"More and more of today's Fortune 1000 enterprises are realizing the value of COPAN's MAID-based platform as a new, higher performance tier for the backup and disaster recovery process," said Dave Davenport, president and CEO of COPAN Systems. "As a leading medical center, UTMB has to meet the strict customer and regulatory demands placed on healthcare facilities today. For COPAN Systems, this is further validation that our solutions are solving critical data problems for today's enterprises seeking to gain greater business advantage."

About the Revolution 200T

COPAN Systems' Revolution 200T delivers massively scalable, reliable, and responsive disk-based solutions to backup/recovery and archive applications at an affordable cost point. The Revolution 200T MAID-based platform is implemented with over a dozen patent-pending technologies that provide unique benefits and advantages to customers. These technologies include a three-tier system architecture, POWER MANAGED RAID(TM) software, DISK AEROBICS(TM) software and unique disk drive packaging, cooling and vibration management. The result is enterprise-class management and data availability, delivering disk-level performance, with substantially reduced footprint, power, and cooling requirements, versus traditional always-on disk arrays.

About COPAN Systems

COPAN Systems is a leading provider of complete storage solutions, based on MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology, that unlock the value of long-term data. The company is led by storage industry veterans from Hitachi Data Systems, StorageTek, Dell and Compaq and others, and is privately-held, with investments by Austin Ventures, Globespan Capital, Pequot Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. COPAN Systems storage solutions have been shipping since March 2004, with customers spanning the healthcare, financial, government, media and service provider industries. Solution implementations include backup/recovery and archive. More information is available at http://www.COPANsys.com.