Crystal Media Selects WANdisco for Multi-Site Development; World Leader in Digital Media Deploys Unique Technology to Enable Development Teams in Taiwan and US to Work as One.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & PLEASANTON, Calif. -- Crystal Media, a wholly-owned subsidiary of MediaTek, one of the world's top 10 fabless IC design companies, and WANdisco, the world leader in real-time multi-site development solutions, today announced that Crystal Media has selected WANdisco for CVS to support their globally distributed software development efforts. WANdisco continues to add marquee customers to its rapidly growing list as it answers the need for real-time collaboration between globally dispersed development teams, as companies continue to move software development offshore.

Crystal Media had been using a home-grown solution to periodically synchronize source code repositories at their sites in Sunnyvale, California and Taiwan. Their development teams were effectively working in isolation. Errors resulting from miscommunication often weren't discovered until the time came to integrate work from the two sites. When network or server failures occurred, development stopped and recovery was nearly impossible.

This meant that development time was dramatically increased, new product introductions took longer than planned, and the company was ultimately losing money. All of these factors led Crystal Media to look for an alternative.

"Other multi-site solutions we evaluated all relied on asynchronous master/slave approaches to replication that would have offered little improvement over what we already had in place," said Felix Freimann, Software Engineering Manager at Crystal Media. "And none of them really addressed disaster recovery and high availability."

Since this home grown approach meant that Crystal Media's repositories were frequently out of sync, they relied on extensive source code branching to prevent work done by developers at one site from conflicting with work done at the other, but this has now changed with the introduction of WANdisco.

"Now with WANdisco's real-time active/active replication capabilities, it really is as if our developers in the US and Taiwan are working together at the same site against the same CVS repository, over a LAN instead of a WAN," stated Freimann. "The isolation between our developers in the US and Taiwan has effectively been eliminated. Problems are detected earlier, our QA cycles have become shorter and there's much less rework than in the past."

In addition, WANdisco's self-healing capabilities were another feature that made a big difference for Crystal Media.

"Prior to installing WANdisco, when there was a network outage our development teams had to stop working for a day or more," explained Freimann. "Since WANdisco, even when network outages occur, our developers have been able to continue working. For example: we had an outage for over two hours a few days ago and our developers didn't even know that it had happened. They simply kept working as normal. When the network came back up, recovery was automatic. We couldn't believe how seamless it was."

WANdisco also offers enterprise-class security features that protect valuable intellectual property and support ongoing compliance with new regulatory requirements imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley.

In addition to WANdisco for CVS, WANdisco recently announced the availability of its new WANdisco for Subversion multi-site development solution. With WANdisco for Subversion, WANdisco brings real-time active-active replication, self-healing and support for guaranteed transactions to Subversion for the first time.

About WANdisco

Since 2001 WANdisco has set out to push the limits of what can be achieved with distributed systems deployed on a Wide Area Network (WAN). The result of these efforts is new technology that fundamentally changes the way distributed nodes, or servers, interact to provide unprecedented levels of reliability, availability and scalability (RAS); Enabling the internet to realize its full potential. WANdisco has applied this technology to the development of its suite of multi-site SCM solutions for CVS, CVSNT, and Subversion. For the first time a development team can truly be spread-out across the world and work as one unit, in real-time.

Global 2000 companies rely on WANdisco's suite of SCM solutions for CVS,CVSNT and Subversion to enable them to distribute work based on where their talent is located, rather than time-zone constraints. This results in dramatically reduced costs and significantly improved utilization of scarce resources.

For more information, visit www.wandisco.com.