EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced that the University of Texas at El Paso and Overstock.com were honored as winners of Storage Networking World's "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program for their exemplary use of EMC technology and their pursuit of information lifecycle management (ILM). These prestigious awards are given to organizations that have demonstrated excellence in creating strategic business value through the innovative use of storage technologies. Winners were recognized during a special awards ceremony at Storage Networking World, a conference co-owned and co-produced by IDG's Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

Howard Elias, EMC's Executive Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Office of Technology, said, "Overstock.com and the University of Texas at El Paso are inspiring examples of how to achieve outstanding business value, improve utilization of IT resources and deliver information and services reliably and securely. We're pleased our solutions contributed to their successful ILM strategies and congratulate them on winning the 'Best Practices in Storage' award."

A wide range of IT end-user companies and organizations responded to an initial "call for nominations," which was originally announced to multiple industry audiences, including Computerworld subscribers responsible for storage solutions. Finalists were evaluated by a panel of judges based on case study submissions that profiled the company, its IT department and storage challenges, as well as application deployment details, summaries of the key technology used and measurable solution outcomes.

The University of Texas at El Paso was a winner in the Award's Data Lifecycle Management category for its use of tiered EMC storage to consolidate student and faculty information systems for improved data availability, IT productivity and cost control. The University relies on an EMC storage area network (SAN) integrated with an EMC network attached storage (NAS) gateway to manage 27,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and images of student records. EMC software allows the University to easily and centrally oversee its tiered storage environments, helping to increase information uptime from 90 to 99 percent. More efficient use of storage has also consolidated the number of servers by 10 percent, leading to significant cost savings. Most important, students and faculty can now access papers, records, and other information around the clock reliably and securely.

Overstock.com, a top-10 Internet retailer and auction website, was a winner in the Award's Innovation and Promise category for its advanced grid-computing infrastructure, anchored by a high-performance EMC storage area network (SAN) and managed by EMC software. Combining automatic load balancing, I/O path failover and real-time data replication, the solution ensures rapid website response times for customers and no loss of business in case of disaster. The new infrastructure reduced web page load times by nearly 30 percent, providing customers with faster response times and an all-around better shopping experience. For Overstock.com, this translated into increased sales. The EMC environment also reduced the time for data warehouse refreshes by 85 percent—from 13 hours to just two hours, dramatically increasing the time employees have for reporting and analysis.

"Each year, I continue to be impressed with the storage initiatives that are outlined in the case studies submitted for the Best Practices in Storage awards program. It is truly an achievement for all who work in the industry to see how storage has been elevated to a business-critical application in a few short years," said Ron Milton, executive vice president for Computerworld. "The Spring 2005 awards demonstrate how powerful storage has become within the business world and how making smart decisions about topics such as industry compliance and data recovery can directly impact a corporation's bottom line."

The complete list of "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program winners can be found online at http://www.snwusa.com/index.html.