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BHF-BANK Chooses StoreAge's SVM To Provide Storage Services

StoreAge Networking Technologies, an innovator in enterprise SAN storage management, has announced the deployment of its SVM (Storage Virtualization Manager) at BHF-BANK, one of Germany's leading financial institutions and part of the Dutch ING Group.

BHF-BANK chose the SVM for its unique asymmetric (off-the-data path) storage virtualization management, Disaster Recovery capabilities and proven performance. The SVM provides BHF-BANK centralized management for distributed enterprise storage, significantly reducing the Total Cost of Ownership. The deployment at BHF-BANK is effected in cooperation with BASIS GmbH, StoreAge's partner in Germany.

BHF-BANK focuses on Asset Management, Corporate Banking, Financial Markets and Private Banking, and utilizes highly critical financial applications for maintaining these services. BHF-BANK chose the SVM to provide a central point of management for its SAN resources after examining alternative solutions and realizing SVM's advantages: top performance; support of automatic fail-over between critical SAN components for complete redundancy; and enabling seamless integration of multiple servers and storage sub-systems of different brands into a centrally managed, large heterogeneous enterprise storage environment.

StoreAge's SVM is a SAN appliance that provides virtual volume management in heterogeneous environments. It features storage capacity and storage performance pooling across the entire SAN space. Uniquely designed to virtualize storage off-the-data path, the SVM does not impose any performance penalty and thus delivers a highly scalable and highly available SAN infrastructure at levels not found with alternative approaches.

It is an ideal platform for SAN-aware Storage Applications such as Remote Mirroring, Snapshot and others and a key enabler for business continuity strategies. The low cost, simplicity and true heterogeneous nature of the SVM make it a perfect vehicle for managing new or existing SANs.

The Bank's financial applications are stored in a disaster immune configuration consisting of two distant sites, 11 km. apart. Each site comprises of multiple Sun Solaris SunFire servers, Brocade SilkWorm 3800 Enterprise Fabric Switches, IBM Enterprise Storage Systems (Sharks) and redundant SVM appliances. IBM Global Services provides the maintenance for the SAN infrastructure.

This configuration ensures BHF-BANK a high level of data availability, with no single point of failure. All the Bank's mission-critical applications are readily available, thereby guaranteeing the most reliable, fast and accurate services for the Bank's customers. This SVM-based solid storage infrastructure enables non-disruptive expansion through the seamless addition of servers, applications and storage devices to the Bank's SANs at any time.

Carsten Beyer, Project Manager at BHF-BANK noted: "After looking for a reliable, high-performance storage management solution, we chose the SVM to centrally manage our organization's storage. We realized that only an off-thedata -path architecture such as that provided by StoreAge could answer our requirements regarding a highly available and highly scalable storage solution. We are committed to providing our customers with the most updated and accurate financial data, and the SVM's unmatched performance helps us fulfill this obligation."

Dani Naor, Director of Business Development at StoreAge, said: "We are very happy that BHF-BANK chose our SVM to manage its storage system. The fact that our solution was chosen proves that SVM's Asymmetric Virtualization is the only architecture well-suited for managing large enterprise SANs such as this prestigious financial institution running critical applications that require zero downtime reliability."

Stefan Fischer, CEO of BASIS GmbH added: "As a system integrator, we are very satisfied with the cooperation among the service organizations of IBM, SUN, StoreAge and BASIS in order to set up a consolidated support strategy for the benefit of the customer. BHF-Bank's project team was also very instrumental in successfully implementing the systems into production at an extremely short timeframe."

Dietmar Wendt, vice president, IBM EMEA Storage Solution Group noted: "BHFBANK is a very important customer in a sensitive environment. We are proud that they have selected IBM's Enterprise Storage Systems as the foundation for their storage infrastructure. Through cooperation with StoreAge and BASIS and the integration of our storage sub-system with StoreAge's Asymmetric Virtualization platform, we were able to deliver an enterprise-class, highly reliable and cost effective solution."

About StoreAge Networking Technologies

StoreAge Networking Technologies is a privately held company founded in 1999 as a spin- off from IIS Intelligent Information Systems and since then obtained over $28 million of equity investment from major strategic as well as leading financial groups.

The Company has offices in Irvine, CA and Nesher, Israel, as well as strategic partners in several European and Far East countries. StoreAge develops and provides innovative storage management software with a focus on Storage Area Network (SAN) architecture. StoreAge is a technology leader in storage virtualization using an asymmetric design implemented through a SAN appliance approach.

The Company seeks to increase and expand its cooperation with major OEM partners, storage systems integrators and storage service providers to deliver advanced storage solutions to the enterprise market. StoreAge is a member of both the US and the European Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and of SNIA's IP Storage Forum.

For additional information visit www.store-age.com.

About BASIS GmbH

BASIS Advanced Information Technologies GmbH, was founded in 1995 and is based in Munich (Germany). BASIS has taken a leadership position in storage management and data recovery solutions. The main business goal of BASIS is to provide state of the art storage technology solutions to European enterprises. BASIS is focused on the design and deployment of enterprise class SAN solutions, with emphasis on storage virtualization, backup and archiving.

For further Information visit www.basis-gmbh.de.

About IBM

IBM is one of the world's largest information technology companies, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM is the number one server vendor in the world. IBM supports more than a dozen key industries worldwide, works with companies of all sizes around the world to deploy the full range of IBM technologies.

For further Information visit www.ibm.com.