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Liberty Health Care Group Implements Business Continuance Plan with Brocade Storage Area Network

Posted on: Tuesday, 2 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)) , the world's leading provider of infrastructure for Storage Area Networks (SANs), announced today that Liberty Health Care Group, Inc. (Liberty) a leading direct-to-home provider of diabetes and respiratory medications and supplies, has chosen Brocade SAN infrastructure to support ongoing data growth, simplify management, and help eliminate system downtime through an overall business continuance strategy. To address its rapid data growth and high-availability requirements, Liberty's Technology Services team has deployed a core-to-edge SAN solution consisting of Brocade SilkWorm(R) 3800 and SilkWorm 2800 fabric switches.

Today, Liberty has plans to connect two data centers into one unified SAN fabric. The SAN configuration is designed to provide redundancy for each data center. This architecture is designed to provide the company's 750 customer service representatives with uninterrupted access to all applications and customer order information. In addition, this redundancy will help enable Liberty to comply with new regulations for maintaining patient records. With over half a million customers and growing, Liberty's chief data management challenge is related to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires the company to store certain information pertaining to customer transactions, from initial customer contact through order fulfillment.

"Having our data safe and accessible is critical to us, and our Brocade SAN has enabled us to implement a business continuance plan to support this need," said John Hegner, Vice President of Technology Services, Liberty Medical Corporation. "In addition, we've increased our storage and server environment tenfold to 150 servers supporting 35 terabytes of data, while maintaining our core staff of four people to manage the SAN.""Liberty's implementation of Brocade is an excellent demonstration of how an organization can leverage the scalability and high availability features of SANs to generate return on investment quickly and protect its data," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade Vice President of Marketing. "We are pleased that Liberty has selected Brocade to support its demanding requirements for information uptime."

About Liberty Health Care Group

Liberty Health Care Group includes Liberty Medical Supply, the nation's leading direct-to-consumer Medicare provider of diabetes testing supplies and medications and other diabetes management products including insulin pumps, shoes for people with diabetes, HbA1c at-home test kits, insulin and syringes. Founded in 1989, Liberty was acquired by PolyMedica Corporation (PLMD) in 1996. More information on Liberty Medical can be found at http://www.libertymedical.com/ .

About Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

Brocade offers the industry's leading intelligent platform 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(R) 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.

NOTE: Brocade, the B weave logo and SilkWorm are registered trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States or in other countries. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners. All products, plans, and dates are subject to change without notice.

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