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AT&T Selects FileTek Solution for Call Detail Data Warehouse - FileTek's StorHouse to manage largest known data warehouse

Rockville, MD (November 17, 1997) – FileTek, Inc. announced today that it was selected by AT&T to install the largest known Call Detail Warehouse (CDW) in the world. This warehouse will store AT&T's call detail for Domestic and International Long-Distance, Wireless, Local, and Internet traffic. FileTek will base the CDW design on its StorHouse® product, a relational database management system (RDBMS) server. Built on FileTek's Enterprise Data Architecture (SM/EDA™ ) technology, StorHouse manages a full hierarchical complement of storage devices that include cache, RAID, optical disk, and tape. With StorHouse, applications have the unique ability to directly access rows of relational data stored anywhere on the StorHouse hierarchy (including tape).

AT&T and FileTek will combine their leading-edge data management technologies for compression, ultra-high-speed data streaming, robotics optimization, and parallel computation to implement CDW. These technologies are the basic building blocks for the following set of CDW features, each uniquely optimized for the telecommunications provider of the 21st century:

• Data availability that meets "network-quality" standards – providing continuous access to data, from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, every day, using high-availability processors and data duplexing throughout the system

• Initial capacity, which is many times larger than known data warehouses, with no upper bounds on system scalability to handle growth, enabling storage of the details associated with every AT&T call

• High-speed extraction and selection of information, enabling rapid construction of data marts for applications like traffic engineering, advertising response measurement, facilities planning, regulatory compliance, and bill generation.

William C. Thompson, FileTek's founder and CEO, remarked, "We are extremely proud that AT&T selected FileTek to provide the advanced technology necessary to build the world's largest data warehouse. FileTek and AT&T have always enjoyed a close working relationship. FileTek's past success in delivering other high-capacity storage systems to AT&T proves that we can produce and maintain robust systems in AT&T's demanding environment. I look forward to supporting the current CDW program and our ongoing plans for its future expansion."

According to John Burgess, FileTek’s co-founder and CTO, "Our engineers designed StorHouse to be the primary detail store of all historical information for data warehouses. It can manage data "orders of magnitude" larger than any existing data warehouses. StorHouse's main role in the data warehouse marketplace is to feed large amounts of information to enterprise or departmental marts. It also provides immediate responses to end-users’ single-record queries. In addition, StorHouse gives organizations a cost advantage per gigabyte of high-density tape and optical media because it eliminates the days-long delay associated with transferring data from "archived" tape-based tables to "active" tables stored on disk. StorHouse complements high-performance decision support systems, just like hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems complement today's operational environments."

StorHouse uses standard SQL to retrieve archived database data in seconds directly from RAID, optical disk, and tape. This means that organizations can store hundreds of terabytes of historical business information in a format accessible and familiar to a worldwide database community. SQL ’92 access to StorHouse occurs from a variety of platforms through a FileTek-developed DB2 DRDA gateway, an ESQL interface, and ODBC drivers. APIs and FTP provide high-volume load access.

StorHouse's performance-oriented HSM software provides the best storage solution for access to historical data at the lowest cost. To help optimize system performance, database administrators can manage selected database components like indexes separately from other components. For example, to facilitate faster retrievals, administrators can configure their StorHouse systems to store indexes in the higher performance layers of the StorHouse storage hierarchy.

The complete CDW system, which includes an AT&T-developed front-end application and the StorHouse server software, will be deployed on several FileTek EDA-410 servers. These servers have the required computing power to handle the enormous volume of CDW data. They feature an advanced Open Systems processor that allows linear SMP scalability of 64 advanced RISC processors, grouped around a 10.8-gigabyte/second crossbar switch.

FileTek, Inc., headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, specializes in enterprise-wide storage systems for managing massive amounts of data on-line. FileTek's products are integral parts of the banking, investment, telecommunications, transportation, and utilities industries, as well as the Federal government. The company markets to end-users worldwide through its North American sales force and an international network of distributors.

For more information, contact: Peter Abzug.
pabzug@filetek.com (301) 517-1823.

© 1997 FileTek, Inc. All rights reserved.

Trademarks: FileTek and StorHouse are U.S. registered trademarks of FileTek, Inc. Other trademarks included herein are the property of their respective owners. The following U.S. patents protect StorHouse: 4,864,572; 5,257,660; 5,727,197.

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