News

Global Relay Chooses MCI's Global Networks & Data Centers to supports its High Performance Archiving & Compliance Services

Vancouver - October 31, 2005 - Global Relay Communications Inc., a leading provider of hosted message archiving services, has chosen the world-class hosting facilities of MCI to now house its West Coast data center operations, in addition to its current Eastern Data Center, in order to deliver mission-critical messaging services on a redundant to its customers world-wide.

The Evolving Challenge

Founded seven years ago, Global Relay has developed a hosted suite of messaging services for businesses including archiving, monitoring, email, email filtering, instant messaging, eDiscovery and business continuity. Global Relay has experienced rapid growth and a more demanding customer base, dictating the expansion from its single internal data center to establishing highly available, mirrored, off-site facilities. In the early days, recalls the company's co-founder and President, Warren Roy, "Global Relay's biggest challenge was providing comfort to customers that security and privacy would not be jeopardized by outsourcing the storage of their critical business data to a third party service provider. As the demand for compliance archiving grew, together with need to satisfy disaster recovery and business continuity concerns, our focus has turned to delivering compliant archiving solutions to customers globally, with full redundancy and the highest levels of security, performance and availability."

MCI East/West Coast Mirrored Data Centers

Turning to MCI in order to address its customers' compliance, availability and business continuity needs, Global Relay has now deployed a messaging environment that mirrors data between geographically dispersed data centers in real time. Originally engaging MCI to host its Eastern Data Center operations, Global Relay quickly experienced the benefits of MCI's networks, facilities and IT management and made the decision to transition its West Coast data center operations to a second MCI facility located in Vancouver. Today, Global Relay relies on a complex data storage infrastructure mirrored between its East and West coast data centers, including a Sun Unix environment, with the front-end firewalls, networks, switches, load balancers and servers engineered by HP, and the back-end anchored by BlueArc's Titan Head, integrated NAS/SAN storage systems, all redundantly hosted offsite in MCI's world-class facilities.

Data Protection Laws

As the impact of the laws and regulations extended beyond the U.S., so has Global Relay's customer base. 80% of Global Relay's customers operate in the U.S., primarily in the financial services sector, including such prestigious organizations as the Chicago Stock Exchange and Fortune 10. Ironically, many American and most non-American firms prefer to have their data held in Canada as opposed to the US, as it is outside the reach of the US Patriot Act and its omnipotent document demands. In Canada, Global Relay is the leading provider of hosted compliance archiving services, with the largest number of IDA customers. Customers in Canada, the UK and Europe, as well as corporations with global operations chose Global Relay as their archive provider of choice since their data is held in a jurisdiction that is approved under the Data Protection Act requirements of the various European countries.

MCI World-Class Facilities

MCI's two highly reliable, first-rate data center facilities are in sophisticated, modern environments. MCI's facilities and networks high standards of security and redundancy include access rights management, biometric fingerprint scanners, electronic key management systems, and incorporate redundant dual Uninterruptible Power Systems. These secure data centers are a critical component in managing Global Relay's control objective which are subject to its SAS-70 certification process. In addition to providing a compliant messaging environment and securely protecting the essential business data of its customers, by leveraging MCI's global network, Global Relay is able to deliver the most reliable and available fully-managed messaging solutions world-wide.

About Global Relay Communications

Founded in 1999, Global Relay is the leading provider of hosted enterprise-class message archiving and compliance solutions for the financial services industry. Built on a reputation of customer service, security and compliance excellence, Global Relay has delivered hosted email, IM and Bloomberg archiving for over 7 years without a single incident of data loss. Global Relay's innovative, easy-to-use, highly secure messaging systems address the requirements of regulatory compliance, audit and eDiscovery, while alleviating the burden of message management, filtering, security, business continuity and message storage. Global Relay operates via a strategic partnership network throughout the US, Canada and Europe. For more information, visit www.globalrelay.com.