Delivering Reliability in Enterprise Backup: an ADIC Case Study.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 18, 2004

Corporate Express, one of the world's largest business-to-business suppliers of office and computer supplies, backs up mission critical customer and e-business data with an ADIC(R) (Nasdaq:ADIC) Scalar(R) 10K automated tape library. At Corporate Express, innovative online processes and data management are part of a strategy that gives the company award-winning customer service and keeps it in a leadership position.

It has also meant fast data growth. According to Corporate Express' Andy Miller Vice President of Technical Architecture, "In the last three years we have seen our e-commerce sales grow to more than 50% of our business, and have seen our data more than triple. We now manage nearly 30 TB of primary customer data." To gain management leverage and keep costs under control, Corporate Express has been centralizing operations and consolidating its data management.

One of the principal needs was for a scalable, consolidated backup resource. "With our old system, we had to buy a whole new library when we needed room for more drives to get higher performance. And then we ended up managing two separate units -- it was going to be too expensive and complex to connect two units together and get them to pass tapes back and forth."

Managing backups was a challenge, and there were lots of failed backups and restores. "We never actually lost data -- but we spent lots of cycles trying to get a clean backup," Mr. Miller explained.

Corporate Express' backup environment is complex as well as fast growing. The system backs up transaction logs every half hour around the clock, with weekly full backups and daily incrementals performed for the entire dataset. The company carries out thousands of separate backup operations each day, covering a variety of UNIX, Linux, and Windows platforms. "When we needed to expand our backup system again, we wanted to simplify it as well, so we did some research," Mr. Miller said.

"We knew we needed a platform that could live with us for five years and scale according to our needs -- letting us add drives and tape slots without having to worry about obsolescence. It needed to work in a SAN, and it needed to be cost effective."

Corporate Express brought The Storage Group, expert storage consultants, to help them perform a thorough analysis of the entire backup process, taking into consideration management costs and projected growth. "We looked at our total TCO over a three to five-year period using all those measures, and we selected the ADIC Scalar 10K as the best long-term solution," Mr. Miller explained.

The Scalar 10K is a scalable, enterprise-class storage networking library that is designed to grow with users' data, making it easy to add capacity and drives while still providing the management advantages of a single library. Corporate Express selected LTO drive technology in their Scalar 10K. With that technology, the library can scale from 700 tapes to 13,884, and it can accommodate up to 324 tape drives -- all in a single, high performance chassis that connects directly to the SAN. The ADIC capacity-on-demand pricing system allows customers to add capacity easily as they need it, deferring purchase until it is actually used. The Corporate Express starting configuration has 20 LTO drives and 1,480 cartridge positions.

When Corporate Express installed the Scalar 10K, the results exceeded all expectations. "With the Scalar 10K our success rate went up dramatically -- during one period we logged over 55,000 consecutive backups without a single failure, something we could never have imagined. We used to have weekly meetings to figure out how to solve our backup problems; those have stopped altogether," Mr. Miller reports. Restore operations have proven equally successful. "We were able to repeatedly restore a 500 GB database in a pre-production test environment without a failure, and production restores have been problem-free."

As far as service calls go, Corporate Express has only needed one on-site visit in the months since the Scalar 10K was installed. Mr. Miller reports, "The response was great."

Online access to this case study is at www.adic.com/us/collateral/CSCORPEXP.pdf.

About Corporate Express

Corporate Express, Inc., a Buhrmann company (NYSE:BUH), is one the world's largest business-to-business suppliers of essential office and computer products and Corporate Express' product offering includes office and computer supplies, imaging and computer graphic supplies, office furniture, facility supplies, document and print management, desktop software, promotional products and other similar products. The Company's Web site address is www.CorporateExpress.com.

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.(1) The Company's data management software, storage networking appliances, and disk-to-tape data protection 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 and OEMs, including Cray, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM and Sun. Further information about ADIC is available at www.adic.com.

(1) IDC 2001 worldwide revenue and unit market share data for all automated systems using DLT, SDLT, LTO, 8mm or AIT drives; Gartner Dataquest, 2002 Market Shares and Forecasts for Tape Automation Systems, F. Yale, August 2002; and, Gartner Dataquest, Tape Automation Systems Market Shares, 2002, F. Yale, April 2003. 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.