Liberty University Standardizes on EMC to Manage Growth and Reduce Costs

Students, Faculty and Administrators Gain Faster, More Reliable Access to IT Services with Suite of EMC Software and Storage

Hopkinton, Mass.-Tuesday, August 29, 2006
EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that Liberty University, a Christian academic community in the tradition of evangelical institutions of higher education, has standardized on EMC® information management software and storage to dramatically improve the performance and availability of its academic and administrative IT applications, while reducing the cost and effort of managing and protecting them.

Aaron Mathes, Liberty University’s Deputy CIO, said, “We’re a rapidly growing university with several initiatives underway, including the aggressive expansion of our distance learning program to make our academic offerings more widely accessible. To achieve this vision, we’ve adopted an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy that can smoothly absorb change and expansion while ensuring consistently high availability of our online services. EMC’s suite of software and storage provides just that by allowing us to easily move our information from one tier of storage to another as it ages.”

“With EMC, we’ve improved application performance by reducing the amount of unused data crowding the production systems, while substantially lowering the data volume and cycle times required for nightly backups. For our students, faculty, and administrative staff, information lifecycle management has meant faster and more reliable access to online services and a more rapid stream of new IT services. For our IT operations, we’ve gained administrative efficiencies that translate into real cost and time savings that we can pour back into development of new services and enhancing the infrastructure.”

Data for all of Liberty’s applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 messaging and collaboration, Blackboard content management and collaboration, and SunGard Banner administration, finance and human resources, is managed in an EMC tiered storage environment. Liberty University uses EMC EmailXtender® software to archive older emails from 40,000 Exchange mailboxes from the high-performance EMC CLARiiON® fibre channel storage system to EMC Centera™ content-addressed storage. Liberty also plans to use EMC DiskXtender® software to archive infrequently accessed files onto Centera. In addition, the University uses EMC NetWorker™ software for the backing up and recovery of data to a lower-cost CLARiiON system using ATA disk drives as opposed to tape.

Seth Sites, Director of Network and System Operations at Liberty University, explained, “By archiving older Exchange data with EMC EmailXtender, we can reduce the amount of data requiring backup by almost 80 percent. When combined with disk backup, archiving has cut the backup time to just a quarter of what it used to take. By deploying this active archiving strategy, we save our users the time and effort of archiving their own emails, while allowing us to increase the size of their Exchange mailboxes so they are more productive and satisfied. It also allows us to reduce the amount of disk space required for backup by as much as one terabyte, so we can allocate the extra space for other applications and extend the value of that storage asset.”

Jonathan Minter, Liberty’s Director of IT Development and Engineering, added, “The EMC solution also improves our recovery management capabilities significantly. Using EMC NetWorker, for example, we recently recovered a 40-gigabyte Exchange store from disk in just 17 minutes. If we had restored from tape, it would have taken between two and three hours—assuming we had the tapes onsite. That allows us to keep our students and faculty much more productive, and cuts our administrative time to just a fraction of what it used to be.”

Based in Lynchburg, Va., Liberty University has chosen a number of other EMC software solutions to more efficiently and effectively manage and protect its EMC infrastructure. These include EMC SAN Copy™, EMC MirrorView™, VMware®, EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender®, EMC VisualSRM™, EMC SnapView™ and EMC PowerPath®.

Mathes noted, “EMC provides us with a total solution, including hardware and software that all work together, which simplifies the way we manage information over time. We believe that EMC is leading the way in ILM, and by embracing ILM, we are able to deliver outstanding services to our students and faculty, while saving money and reducing administrative effort.”

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.
For more on EMC news, events, and recent media coverage visit the news section of EMC.com. Note to editors: For further information about this release contact EMC Public Relations at pr@emc.com

EMC, EmailXtender, CLARiiON, DiskXtender, ApplicationXtender and PowerPath are registered trademarks, and Centera, Networker, SAN Copy, MirrorView, VisualSRM and SnapView are trademarks of EMC Corporation. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc., an EMC company. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

This release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) risks associated with acquisitions and investments, including the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (vi) component and product quality and availability; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (ix) war or acts of terrorism; (x) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; and (xii) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

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