NEWS BRIEFS

Anaheim, CALIF. — MTI Technology Corp., a leading enterprise storage and business solutions provider, announced that the U.S. Census Bureau has extended its investment in MTI enterprise storage solutions to protect the massive amounts of data that will impact most Americans’ lives for decades to come.

Census 2000 has involved an army of more than 400,000 temporary workers and full-time employees to tally up a massive amount of data collected from 118 million households that represents some 275 million people across the United States.

This data will be crunched and churned out in thousands of various studies and reports that will guide decision-makers in local and federal agencies to determine where monies will be spent on schools, employment services, housing assistance, highway construction, hospital services and various assistance programs.

Community organizations can use the information to develop social service programs, and businesses study the numbers to determine where to locate factories, shopping centers, movie theaters, banks and offices. The data is also used to set the number of seats each state will have in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as state legislatures.

Not having instantaneous access to, or even losing, this valuable data could have far-reaching consequences. MTI has been working with the Population Division of the U.S. Census Bureau for the last five years to protect its critical data and assure its availability.

“We needed a high degree of reliability and a high degree of data transfer capability,” said Bob Nunziata, chief of the Computer Application and Processing Staff branch within the Population Division. “We get a lot of requests for specialized tabulations and information from the wealth of data that’s within the census, much of which is not readily available in published reports.

“This information is only available electronically, so we need to have the ability to have immediate and reliable access to massive amounts of data.”

When the Bureau first began looking for an enterprise storage vendor, Nunziata said he was concerned with price/performance. He also felt that RAID technology was the optimal choice for his organization’s needs.

“We knew we needed to address high availability,” Nunziata said. “We also wanted to make the system as efficient as possible in terms of management and configuration. We determined that MTI offered the best value in terms of price/performance and in terms of technical innovation – that being how they addressed high availability. We compared MTI to other vendors and felt that it had among the best solutions.”

In addition to selecting MTI for its RAID expertise, Nunziata said that service was an important consideration. “We looked at each vendor’s organization for a management overview of how they ran their service operations,” he said. “We wanted to know what sort of facilities they had close by in case of potential problems. We also assessed how many field representatives each had per install. From this research, we came away feeling very comfortable with MTI.”

Supporting a UNIX server running SAS applications, MTI presently provides multiple terabytes of Fibre Channel based, high-availability, fault tolerant enterprise class storage. Nunziata said the amount of storage is anticipated to continue to grow at a rate of 20% annually for the foreseeable future, as the Population Division anticipates a large number of data requests following the release of the 2000 census.

“The data stored within the Census Bureau’s servers is potentially worth billions of dollars that will be allocated to benefit hundreds of thousands of communities throughout the country,” said Peggy Ouimet, vice president of marketing for MTI. “It is an absolute necessity that this data remain highly accessible and secure. MTI has continued to work with and support the Census Bureau’s Population Division over the last five years and is eager to carry on this important task for many years to come.”

Nunziata expressed similar feelings. “Over the past five years it’s been a true, mutually beneficial relationship with MTI,” he said. “We’ve really grown to appreciate MTI, which is heads and shoulders above the competition. We’re really pleased with the technical support, but I feel what is key is the sales support we’ve received.

“I think MTI’s sales support is the benchmark that all other vendors – even ones that aren’t storage-related – should live up to. You really feel like you have a partner, who is not only there through the initial purchase, but through setup and the entire time you have the product. They are far and away the best sales organization that we have dealt with.”

MTI’s Vivant’s SAN and NAS architectures provide a completely integrated, full-service storage solution. Driven by MTI’s patented parallel RAID engines that can support more than 16 high-availability servers, the Vivant family of storage solutions sets the standards for scalability, flexibility and connectivity, as well as optimum performance.

MTI’s mission is to provide Continuous Access to Online Information through fault-tolerant, cross-platform data storage servers for the enterprise. MTI develops, manufactures, sells and services data server solutions for Global 2000 companies on a worldwide basis.

With headquarters in Anaheim, the company offers services and support from more than 40 offices in the United States and Europe and complies with ISO 9001 quality system standards. For more information, visit MTI’s Web site at http://www.mti.com .

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