Four Seasons Hotel, Washington, D.C. SOURCE Strategic Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

Mountain View, Calif., USA – October 13, 2010

Symantec Helps Strategic Hotels & Resorts Eliminate Data Protection Outsourcing Costs

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that Strategic Hotels & Resorts, a Chicago-based real estate investment trust, has significantly reduced the money and time it spends on data protection after implementing Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and a backup appliance from ExaGrid Systems.

Fairmont Hotel, Chicago SOURCE Strategic Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

With Symantec and ExaGrid, Strategic Hotels & Resorts eliminated $150,000 it was spending annually on outsourcing data backups and reduced the amount of time the IT director spends on backups to just 30 seconds a day.

Hotel Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, Arizona SOURCE Fairmont Scottsdale Princess

"The outsourced solution worked well, but the cost of backups grew to between $12,000-$14,000 per month," said Bryce White, director of information technology, Strategic Hotels & Resorts.
"After we opened a disaster recovery site 30 miles from corporate headquarters, I looked at the cost of backups and the fact that we had a second location and realized bringing data protection in-house with Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and the ExaGrid Systems EX2000 appliance would save us a lot of money."

Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, Arizona SOURCE Strategic Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

Strategic Hotels & Resorts does not rely on a property management company and so receives financial data for its properties and analyzes that data to support operational decisions about staffing levels, remodeling projects and branding.

Symantec Backup Exec Family Photo: Symantec

This information must be constantly available, and even a short period of downtime would be expensive as asset managers, business analysts and senior executives would not be able to perform their daily tasks.

Real solutions for the virtual world. Photo: Symantec

Additionally, because the company is publicly traded, it has to follow strict SEC reporting requirements and a data outage at quarterly reporting time would be potentially catastrophic.

Backup Exec 2010 – Finalist in the Best of Tech Ed 2010. Backup Exec 2010 wins the Backup and Recovery category outperforming CommVault Simpana 8. The judging panel, consisting of Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine editors determined the winner on the basis of innovation, strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage, and exceptional value to customers. Photo: Symantec

So the 43-person public company worked with its solutions provider CDW to implement a disk-based backup appliance from Symantec partner ExaGrid Systems and Symantec's Backup Exec 2010 software for backing up data to the appliance.

Full backups are run on a weekly basis and incremental backups nightly, and all data is retained for 90 days.

Photo: Symantec

"I read through the logs every morning, and that's the extent of the administration tasks Backup Exec 2010 requires," added White.
"By eliminating the $150,000 annual cost of outsourcing, we achieved payback on our investment in the hardware and software in just three months, and I am 100 percent confident that it is keeping our data safe."

Symantec Backup Exec 2010 delivers reliable backup and recovery designed for your growing business. Easily protect more data while you reduce storage and management costs through integrated deduplication and archiving technology. Reduce business downtime, ensure critical information on virtual or physical systems is always protected and restored in seconds. Photo: Symantec

Strategic Hotels & Resorts leverages the Backup Exec 2010 Deduplication Option to reduce the volume of backup data at the source.

Removing redundant data at the client rather than at the appliance, minimizes the load that backups place on the WAN, in addition to the amount of storage they require.

Symantec Backup Exec 2010 delivers reliable backup and recovery designed for your growing business. Reduce business downtime, ensure critical information on virtual or physical systems is always protected and restored in seconds. Photo: Symantec

"That's reduced the four terabytes of data on our file shares down to just 500 gigabytes, an eight-to-one reduction. Each week's full backup which used to consume three days now takes only nine hours," said White.
"There's no question we would have bandwidth issues without the deduplication option, which is reducing the backup traffic across our WAN by nearly 90 percent."


About Strategic Hotels & Resorts


Strategic Hotels & Resorts, Inc. is a real estate investment trust (REIT) which owns and provides value-enhancing asset management of high-end hotels and resorts in the United States, Mexico and Europe.

The company currently has ownership interests in 17 properties with an aggregate of 8,002 rooms.
For a list of current properties and for further information, please visit the company's website at

http://www.strategichotels.com/  


About Storage from Symantec


Symantec helps organizations secure and manage their information-driven world with storage management, email archiving, backup & recovery solutions.


About Symantec


Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world.

Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored.

More information is available at

www.symantec.com  


http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20101013_01  



Enrique Salem

President and Chief Executive Officer of Symantec

Enrique Salem, President & CEO of Symantec Photo: Symantec

Enrique Salem is president and chief executive officer of Symantec, a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world.
Salem is also a member of Symantec’s board of directors.

Throughout his 16-year tenure at Symantec Salem held a variety of senior management roles, giving him broad experience across Symantec’s products and operations.
Most recently he served as chief operating officer, with responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the company.
Prior to that, he served as group president, Worldwide Sales and Marketing where he managed global sales and partner programs, marketing, communications and branding.

Before joining Symantec, Salem was president and CEO of Brightmail, the leading anti-spam software company that was successfully acquired by Symantec in 2004.

From 2001 to 2002, he served as senior vice president of products and technology at Oblix Inc., where he spearheaded corporate strategy and development by leading the company's engineering, product management, and technology groups.

Prior to Oblix Inc., Salem was vice president of technology and operations at Ask Jeeves Inc. responsible for the engineering group and the company's entire IT operation.

Salem joined Symantec in 1990 through the Peter Norton Computing acquisition and held a number of leadership positions, including vice president of security products and the company’s first chief technology officer.

Earlier in his career, Salem was a vice president at Security Pacific Merchant Bank, where he led projects for the development of real-time trading systems.

In 2010, Salem received the Estrella Award by the Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC) which recognizes individuals for their vast achievements in the IT industry and in the community He was also named 2007 Corporate Executive of the Year by Hispanic Net as well as 2004 Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst and Young. Salem currently serves on the board of directors of Automatic Data Processing Inc (ADP).

Salem received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Dartmouth College.

http://www.symantec.com/about/profile/management/executives/bio.jsp?bioid=enrique_salem  


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