Storage:

Met Office Certifies and Accepts Delivery of FileTek MASS

FileTek Inc, a data storage and access management systems provider, announced that the Met Office (U.K.) has formally certified and accepted delivery of the Massive Archival Storage System (MASS) built and integrated by FileTek. The MASS installation, which includes FileTek's StorHouse product, is designed to manage and provide SQL access to petabytes of relational and unstructured data, and was approved after strenuous testing and benchmarking.

Currently, MASS is storing over 75 terabytes of data after successfully performing 175,000 operational tasks during testing. MASS is expected to archive and manage over one petabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000s of bytes) of data by 2005 and 2.5 petabytes by 2010. In 2001, MASS won the Process Innovation Award from Kinetic Information, a research and professional services firm that provides business consulting on technology matters.

The MASS installation supports several major users including the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, which the British government has tasked since 1990 to investigate the changing global climate. The Hadley Centre continually collects weather data from the worldwide network of automatic and manned observation stations. Then by analyzing and feeding the collected mass of observational data into numerical weather prediction models, scientists predict-with increasing confidence-future global warming trends.

"This system acceptance is a major milestone in our quest to make substantial amounts of meteorological data available to our scientists," said John Ponting, the Met Office's Chief Information Officer. "The MASS project has broken new boundaries in storage and data management, and we appreciate FileTek's strong commitment to ensure our success; we are pleased to accept the system, which is in line with our objective in retaining our position as a world-leading environmental information provider."

"Working with the Met Office to accomplish this unique and special project has been particularly satisfying," said Ann Dyball, Regional Area Manager at FileTek U.K. Limited in London. "MASS is not only a technical achievement, but also a means to understand the issues of global warming. FileTek is proud to be a part of that undertaking."

FileTek's flagship product, StorHouse, scales to virtually unlimited volumes of data storage and enables row-level access to that data, as well as associated binary objects, stored across all storage media (e.g., disk, optical, and tape). It transparently integrates with the most popular databases, such as Oracle, DB2 UDB, and SQL Server, and supports industry-standard gateways and data access methods. For more information, e-mail info@filetek.com or call 301-517-1823.

About FileTek

FileTek Inc is a provider of data storage and access management systems,enabling enterprises, worldwide and across multiple industry segments, to rapidly access ever-growing volumes of historical data. FileTek is headquartered at 9400 Key West Avenue, Rockville, MD, 20850 USA. Telephone: 301-251-0600. Fax: 301-251-1990. The company's U.K. office is located at One Northumberland Ave., London WC2N 5BW. Telephone: +44 (0) 207 872 5583. Fax: +44 (0) 207 753 2829. FileTek also has offices located in Germany and Belgium. Internet: www.filetek.com.

About the Met Office

The Met Office is a world leader in the provision of advice on the weather and the natural environment. For 140 years, it has been the UK's national weather service, providing services to government departments, companies in commerce, industry and the media. The Met Office also investigates the impacts of the weather on the environment. The Met Office is also expanding its international operations and is extending cooperation and forging partnerships within the international "weather" communities. Internet: www.metoffice.com.