Adding Disk To Improve Enterprise Backup: An ADIC Case Study.

REDMOND, Wash. -- Using solutions from Advanced Digital Information Corporation (Nasdaq:ADIC), the leader in Intelligent Storage(TM) solutions for the open systems market, Northeast Delta Dental has reduced the cost and time associated with managing its enterprise backup.

Northeast Delta Dental is northern New England's premier dental benefits administrator, covering more than 650,000 people and processing more than 1.3 million claims per year. For the IT department, protecting and restoring data quickly is one of its most important jobs. When the backup team saw it couldn't restore files as quickly as their customers needed, they upgraded their backup system to make it faster, but also insisted on keeping their existing data protection protocols intact. The answer was a new backup system that combined an ADIC(R) Pathlight(R) VX disk backup solution with an ADIC Scalar(R) tape library.

"Pathlight VX gives us disk backup advantages while keeping our tape-based security practices, and it has worked wonderfully," said Dan Kaplan, Northeast Delta Dental Manager of Networking and Technical Support. "Now the tapes are created in the background and don't use our backup servers and Storage Area Network (SAN)."

Disk Provides a Solution

Northeast Delta Dental's IT department liked the idea of getting disk into their backup, but they absolutely demanded the security of off-site tape storage and wanted to decrease management time. They looked at using backup software and conventional ATA disk arrays as a backup target but rejected it.

Kaplan said, "We realized it was going to be hard to share our storage resources and creating tapes was going to become even more difficult. We saw too many steps, too much scripting, too many points of failure, and too much extra management."

Instead, the IT department selected ADIC's Pathlight VX disk-to-tape backup solution, which they deployed with an ADIC Scalar 24 automated tape library. Pathlight VX is a disk backup solution that makes ATA disk arrays look like a tape library, so existing backup software can write easily to it. It also features an integrated path for creating physical tapes that can be exported for long-term storage.

Reducing Costs and Management Time

Pathlight VX also provided an elegant way for Northeast Delta Dental to better meet its service level objective. Every night the primary data is first backed up to the Pathlight VX disk, and then Pathlight VX creates copies of the volumes on physical tapes. The tapes are removed each day and secured in an off-site facility -- just like before -- but now the IT team keeps a copy of the files on disk for five days. That means that data recovery now takes place in a few minutes instead of several hours.

Kaplan adds, "We find that almost all of our restore requests come within five days of data creation, so we have effectively stopped having to bring tapes back for recovery. The restore speeds of the Pathlight VX system are simply awe inspiring -- much faster than we saw before from tape."

If the IT team does need to bring tapes back for recovery, they can still do it. The tapes are written in the application's native format, and they can be restored in a conventional library if necessary. The best thing is how simple and automated it all is -- one process creates tapes for export as well as local copies for fast restores.

"ADIC helped us look at our needs and came up with a solution that really makes our backup life easier," said Michael Bourbeau, Northeast Delta Dental, Vice President of Information Systems. "We do less management, our overall costs have been reduced, and our administrators are able to help our customers solve other problems."

A formatted copy of this case study is posted at www.adic.com/deltadental.

About Northeast Delta Dental

Offering the largest dentist network in its three states, Northeast Delta Dental provides dental benefits to over 650,000 people in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The Company also extends its mission through its foundation, funding oral health initiatives in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

About ADIC

Advanced Digital Information Corporation (Nasdaq:ADIC) is a leading provider of Intelligent Storage(TM) solutions to the open systems marketplace. ADIC is the world's largest supplier of automated tape systems using the drive technologies most often employed for backing up open system, client-server networks.(a) The Company's data management software, storage networking appliances, and disk-based backup and restore solutions provide IT managers innovative tools for storing, managing, and protecting their most valuable digital assets in a variety of disk and tape environments. ADIC storage products are available through a worldwide sales force and a global network of resellers, OEMs and partnerships, including Apple, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM, and Sun. Further information about ADIC is available at www.adic.com.

(a) Market Share:Gartner Dataquest, Tape Automation Systems Market Shares, 2004, F. Yale, August 2005. ADIC and Scalar are registered trademarks and Intelligent Storage is a trademark of Advanced Digital Information Corporation. All other trade or service marks mentioned in this document should be considered the property of their respective owners.