DALLAS, TX -- A team of leaders in the storage networking industry has broken the two-terabyte per hour backup barrier by successfully backing up a real world two-terabyte database in under one hour. The benchmark demonstrates that the data performance and protection required in large enterprise data centers to support mission-critical business continuance applications is available today. Shortened backup windows allow companies to more effectively safeguard their critical data and achieve increased utilization of IT assets. The performance test was conducted in a Storage Area Network (SAN) environment featuring equipment from Brocade, Emulex Corporation, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems and VERITAS Software backing up an Oracle9i Database. "Reliable and fast data protection for mission-critical business information has become strategically important to corporations worldwide," said Steve Kenniston, senior analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "Improving backup and restore times at a significant level, based on real world database configurations, will be of great advantage to companies who view maximum uptime as an essential business requirement." Performed at the VERITAS iLab in Mountain View, Calif., the tests used a two-terabyte Oracle9i Database running on a highly available Sun Fire(TM) 6800 server, configured to simulate a 6-terabyte enterprise environment. The high performance storage area network, which was built on a highly available foundation of 2 Gigabit per second (Gbit/sec) Brocade SilkWorm® 3200 and 3800 fabric switches, included six terabytes of StorageTek D-Series disk and two StorageTek L700E libraries with twenty-four 9840B tape drives, connected to the Sun server via Emulex 2 Gbit/sec LP9002L Fibre Channel host bus adapters. Engineers employed VERITAS NetBackup DataCenter(TM) 4.5 software to perform the benchmark. In addition to the core VERITAS NetBackup product, the VERITAS NetBackup for Oracle Agent was used along with Oracle's Recovery Manager (RMAN) technology to facilitate backup of the Oracle9i Database. VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle provided enhanced system manageability and performance.