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ST. VINCENT HOSPITAL DEPLOYS BROCADE SAN INFRASTRUCTURE

Brocade Communications Systems Inc, one of the world's leading providers of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs), has announced that St. Vincent Hospital and Healthcare Services has deployed Brocade SAN infrastructure, including the SilkWorm 12000 Core Fabric Switch, as the highly available, intelligent foundation for its mission-critical enterprise SAN. St. Vincent Hospitals and Health Services supports more than 400,000 patients a year across eighty facilities. In order to manage such a diverse set of facilities and such a large number of patient records from a single data center, the hospital's IT staff relies on innovative technology solutions that keep the hospital on the leading edge of healthcare technology.

The largest healthcare provider in Indiana, St. Vincent was faced with the need to protect and store increasing amounts of patient data for the life of patients, as required by a new healthcare industry regulation known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In addition, several new, large-capacity, cross-platform applications were beginning to create significant management and space concerns for the IT staff, which expects the hospital to double the number of servers and storage capacity every year.

To address these issues, St. Vincent decided to migrate from its DirectAttached Storage (DAS) model to a Brocade SAN in order to manage rapid data growth in a physically constrained data center while improving network performance and scalability across the enterprise and enable 300 data center servers to share the capacity of the hospital's storage resources. In less than six months, the hospital realized a return on its SAN investment and was able to provide a more reliable platform to support remote backup and disaster recovery initiatives. Furthermore, although St. Vincent continues to grow, the hospital hasn't had to add any operation staff since deploying the SAN.

"At St. Vincent, we have a tremendous need for storage networking solutions that provide scalability, performance, and reliability to safeguard our patient data," said Andy Porter, Lead Storage Architect for St. Vincent Hospital. "We have completely standardized on Brocade as our SAN infrastructure provider to meet the stringent requirements of our data center and those of the healthcare industry. Unlike monolithic director-class switches, which didn't give us the flexibility and scalability we needed, the SilkWorm 12000 gave us a lot of flexibility and growth. Moving to 2 Gbit/sec switches is a strategic infrastructure decision that will allow us to keep up with the latest technology."

The St. Vincent SAN is designed primarily for high availability, high performance, and superior flexibility with a core-to-edge network featuring two separate fabrics in a redundant configuration supporting over 15 terabytes of storage capacity. Two SilkWorm 12000 2 Gbit/sec switches reside at the core of the network, and twelve SilkWorm 2800 switches are located at the edge to provide server fanout. Eventually, the IT staff plans to incorporate 2 Gbit/sec SilkWorm 3800 16-port Enterprise Fabric Switches to provide an end-to-end 2 Gbit/sec data path. St. Vincent is also planning to leverage the Brocade Extended Fabrics feature in order to deploy a long-distance disaster recovery SAN at a remote location. Extending the SAN infrastructure to a secondary site would enable the IT staff to perform offsite tape backups and remote data mirroring-capabilities that would further help the hospital comply with new HIPPA regulations.

"We are delighted to be chosen as the intelligent storage networking platform for St. Vincent's data center and to offer a complete enterprise class core-to-edge solution that delivers best-in-class performance and value," said Jeffrey Brooks, Brocade Chief Marketing Officer. "Brocade continues to exceed the needs of our customers by enabling organizations like St. Vincent to develop and deploy SAN infrastructure strategies to better manage growth while optimizing existing IT environments."

About St. Vincent Hospitals and Healthcare Services

St. Vincent Hospitals and Health Services includes eight hospitals in Indiana: St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital, St. Vincent Carmel Hospital, St. Vincent Mercy Hospital in Elwood, St. Vincent Williamsport Hospital, St. Vincent Jennings Hospital in North Vernon, St. Vincent Frankfort Hospital, St. Vincent Randolph Hospital in Winchester and St. Vincent Clay Hospital in Brazil.

Along with St. Joseph's Hospital in Kokomo, St. Vincent is a founding member of the Central Indiana Health System, a values-based alliance of local health care providers.

About Brocade Communications Systems Inc

Brocade offers one of the industry's leading intelligent platforms for networking storage. The world's leading systems, applications, and storage vendors have selected Brocade to provide a networking foundation for their SAN solutions. The Brocade SilkWorm family of fabric switches and software is designed to optimize data availability and storage and server resources in the enterprise. Using Brocade solutions, companies can simplify the implementation of storage area networks, reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage environments, and improve network and application efficiency. For more information, visit the Brocade Website at www.brocade.com or contact the company at info@brocade.com.

CONTACT: Fenella Tigner, 408-392-6843, or ftigner@brocade.com.