McDATA i10K Supports Universal Data Sharing at Huhtamaki Americas.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- Employees at Huhtamaki Americas, one of the world's largest global packaging companies, are now able to universally share sales and financial data, access business applications, and file operational status reports from any location with their new McDATA-based Storage Area Network (SAN). Huhtamaki replaced its Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) environments with a unified, Fibre Channel SAN based on McDATA Corporation's (Nasdaq:MCDTA)(Nasdaq:MCDT) Intrepid(R) 10000 (i10K) Director.

"I wish we had scrapped our old DAS for a SAN much earlier," said Eric Lee, Systems Administrator for Huhtamaki. "McDATA has made it much easier to consolidate IT operations and improve application performance for our end users across North and South America, and allowed us to implement a solid disaster recovery system using their i10K as the backbone of our SAN. The improved performance has led to more streamlined business operations and has positively impacted the bottom line."

Huhtamaki's IT staff deployed McDATA's Intrepid 10000 Director as the backbone of its SAN to guide information between the storage array and the company's Domino and SQL servers. By creating a reliable storage fabric, the IT staff improved application performance and made data available across the entire region. Business staffs in the sales and accounting departments are now able to collaborate across facilities and disparate systems to work with their Web-based business applications. The improved application performance has also allowed Huhtamaki to eliminate a number of servers, saving the company in equipment and management costs.

Additionally, backup has been streamlined. A full backup formerly required 32 hours of direct backup to tape. Now, Huhtamaki backs up incrementally to disk in 30 minutes each night and performs full backup on the weekends. Huhtamaki's new disaster recovery system optimizes facility efficiency and ensures IT resources are available at all times, which gives the business staff the peace of mind that data will not be lost permanently in case of unplanned downtime.

"After expanding into North and South America, Huhtamaki needed to consolidate and unify sprawling IT resources and deploy a network capable of supporting transcontinental employee collaboration," said Gary Gysin, senior vice president of worldwide sales and service, McDATA. "By deploying McDATA's Intrepid 10000 at the backbone of its new storage network, Huhtamaki's 'Americas' region is now highly efficient."

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 

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