KBC and Gresham Storage Solutions agree multi-year deal for Enterprise DistribuTape; KBC sees significant advantages in lower operating costs and improved tape library utilization

AUSTIN, Texas, August 13th, 2009 – Gresham today announced that KBC Bank, an existing customer, has deepened its relationship with Gresham and agreed to a multiple year site license for its Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT) product as part of a move on the bank’s part to a standardized backup environment. Reasons cited by KBC for extending its use of EDT include operational cost-savings, improved tape library utilization, greater resiliency and “green” benefits.

Operational Cost-Savings

KBC, a Gresham customer since 2003, has benefited greatly from its adoption of Gresham’s Clareti Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT) product. EDT has been the glue between KBC’s backup servers and its tape libraries. EDT has consistently allowed KBC to maximize the utilization of the tape drives that are installed in their libraries slowing the rate at which they would have otherwise needed to acquire new tape drives. EDT’s error handling capabilities have also decreased the number of backup failures, decreasing the amount of time required to administer the environment. “EDT has helped us streamline our backup environment” says Guy Haeck, General Manager ICT Infrastructure, KBC. He went on to say “by managing the connection between our servers and tape libraries, EDT gives us peace of mind in knowing that problems with our backups will be minimal and utilization of our drives will be high.”

Better Utilization and Greater Resiliency

“The advantage that EDT delivers to businesses is the ability to make better use of expensive tape assets. While other companies may claim to offer this through tape drive sharing, only by having a deep understanding of how the tape library works and being able to fully expose all of its features and functions can a truly optimized, highly resilient solution be created” said Christopher S. Young, Business Unit Director, Gresham Storage Solutions. “We have spent years perfecting EDT to ensure it delivers optimal tape utilization and exceptional resiliency. KBC is an excellent example of a firm that understands the importance of taking advantage of EDT to ensure its backups run in the most efficient manner, at the lowest possible cost and with the greatest peace of mind.”

“Green” Benefits

KBC recognizes the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and tries to minimize its impact on the environment. KBC sees EDT as an enabling technology in this pursuit. “EDT lets us make more efficient use of existing tape assets. It saves us from having to buy new tape drives that mean we use less power and generate less heat” said Peter Praet, Project Leader ICT Infrastructure, KBC. “EDT also lets us do more backups directly from multiple servers using LAN-Free and this saves us from having to have as much disk on hand to stage these backups. That saves power and heat too and to us, everything that we can do to minimize our impact on the environment is worthwhile.”

KBC is only one of numerous Global 2000 organizations that are benefiting from EDT and its ability to decrease operational costs, improve tape library utilization, insulate backups from errors and deliver indirect “green” benefits. EDT is available on Windows, UNIX and Linux operating systems and supports SUN ACSLS, IBM 3494* and Quantum DAS/SDLC* controlled tape libraries in Tivoli Storage Manager backup environments.