The Organization

Corporate Express is a supplier of office and 
computer products and services with annual 
revenues of approximately $4 billion, and more
than 300 locations around the world. The
company operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 
and relies on innovative inventory management 
and information systems to keep a leadership 
position in its market.  For Corporate Express,
that means that robust data management is 
absolutely essential.

The Challenge

To create a highly available and scalable tape
area network based on storage area network (SAN)
technology while decreasing data backup and 
recovery time.

The Solution

Create a Fibre Channel-based Storage Area 
Network (SAN)using McDATA, Sun, EMC and 
StorageTek interoperable technology.

System Configuration

Hardware

One McDATA ED-5000 Director with two Sun UE 10000
servers (partitioned into nine domains), one EU 250 
and one EU 450, nine JNI SBus host bus adapters 
(one for each domain), and four McDATA EB-1200 
Bridges (SCSI-to-Fibre Channel and back) to link 
the UE 10000s to two StorageTek TimberWolf 9740 
storage libraries, four EMC Symmetrix enterprise 
storage systems, and one NT server.

Software

The tape backup system is managed with NetBackup 
by Veritas.

Quantifiable Results

• Decreased server administrators by 20% through 
the elimination of weekend work
• Decreased tape backup time by 40%
• Increased system reliability and manageability

mcdata.com

The SAN Solution

Corporate Express wanted the ability to backup
all worth of data within two to four hours and 
have a recovery system that could get data back 
within two hours.  Without a SAN, setting up a 
system that could achieve two-hour recovery
would be far too expensive. The costs would work
out to be approximately $65,000 per UE-10000 
system board before adding memory, CPU and I/O.

The only practical solution was to implement a 
SAN. Why? Most companies focus on the difficulty 
involved with changing their IT infrastructure 
and the risk of losing vital data when 
reconfiguring storage. Corporate Express was far
more concerned with the complexity and the 
expense associated with overextending the 
infrastructure it had in place. In other words,
the company understood that the bigger risk was 
in not upgrading.

“With our old backup and recovery process, we 
relied on direct-connect tape devices with an 
average of one backup for every five servers,” 
Fay said. “To use this configuration after 
server consolidation, we would have had to 
have multiple SCSI ports on multiple system 
boards. That’s expensive. By switching to a 
Fibre Channel-based SAN, we only needed one
system board that has tape connectivity per 
domain.” “The SAN is great,” Fay said. “It 
allows you to bring all your tape backup
capacity to bear on backing up a single
domain. Without the SAN, we’d have to unplug
cables in order to use additional drives for
a backup. That’s nothing but increased 
complexity and risk.”

It also turned out that Corporate Express 
implemented a SAN at a fortuitous time.
Reconfiguring its data center has positioned
the company to handle a surprisingly steep 
growth curve in e-commerce. E-business is
especially sensitive to ultra-high 
availability, and SANs based on McDATA’s
ED-5000 Directors provide unparalleled fault 
tolerance and failover capability.

“We’re currently pushing five percent of our 
sales via the Web,” Fay said. “We expect that 
to grow to 40 percent this year (2000). We have 
the opportunity with the SAN to easily meet our 
availability requirements.”

SAN Benefits Enjoyed by Corporate Express

• Decreased server administrators by 20%
• Decreased tape backup time by 40%
• Increased system reliability and manageability