BROOMFIELD, Colo., Aug. 21, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a leading IT services and business process outsourcing company with more than $5 billion in annual revenue, is able to provide its customers with superior IT performance and business process management services through its reliable, high-performing McDATA Storage Area Network (SAN). McDATA Directors form the backbone for ACS's storage fabric, allowing the outsourcing firm to offer highly-scalable storage capacity on demand.
"Our customers don't have to worry about their IT network. They simply hand the responsibility over to us and they are free to concentrate on their core competency," said Bill Augustadt, vice president and CTO of ACS. "McDonald's can focus on making cheeseburgers, Nike can design comfortable shoes and Disney can continue to entertain."
In order to ensure systems availability, scalability, security, redundancy and performance, the IT staff at ACS deployed separate SANs at seven facilities across the country and connected them via McDATA 6140 Directors. This unique network architecture allows ACS to provide its customers with both dedicated and shared storage resources. Each customer has its own dedicated storage, but ACS can provision resources between SANs to meet each customer's dynamic capacity needs.
The ACS storage network was also designed with built-in redundancy for disaster recovery and data consistency. The McDATA Intrepid Directors replicate data between the geographically-diverse data centers, ensuring that each storage pool can be validated and information is consistent across storage pools. This is no small task as the ACS network consists of dozens of different vendors' arrays, peripherals, and devices, in addition to the Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, SQL, Web, e-commerce and email applications that run on the network. It takes more than 36,000 mid-range servers to run all the systems. The interoperable McDATA directors also make it easier for ACS to consolidate resources under one storage fabric and manage the systems from a central location.
"McDATA serves as a trusted IT advisor to ACS, providing its management with the peace of mind that their storage network will be able to support their customers' changing IT needs," said Adrian Jones, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Service, McDATA. "We have a shared commitment to providing continuous system availability to ACS' customers."
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.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains statements about expected future events that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Readers are urged to consider statements that include the terms "believes", "belief", "expects", "plans", "objectives", "estimates", "anticipates", "intends", "targets", or the like to be uncertain and forward-looking. Factors that could cause actual results to differ and vary materially from expectations include, but are not limited to, McDATA's relationships with EMC, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems and the level of their orders, aggressive price competition by numerous other SAN and IP switch suppliers, OEM qualification of our new products -- such as the Intrepid 10000 Director, integration of CNT's sales and marketing functions, manufacturing constraints, constraints in obtaining third party product for resale and other risk factors that are disclosed in McDATA's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These cautionary statements by McDATA should not be construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacy of disclosures made by McDATA. All cautionary statements should be read as being applicable to all forward-looking statements wherever they appear. McDATA does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.