July 12, 2002 -- Recognizing the vital need of prepress departments to archive and recover crucial graphics files at a moment's notice, The TOLIS Group, Inc., a Talented Organization Leveraging Intelligent Solutions, and Blanchard Systems, Inc., today jointly announce the TOLIS Group's BRU data backup and recovery technology has been certified and chosen to supply critical data protection services within Blanchard's Vortex branded Storage Solutions. Blanchard's Vortex Prepress systems are scalable, infinitely flexible and fully adaptable solutions engineered to eliminate bottlenecks, increase production efficiencies, achieve greater profitability and continue to meet prepress requirements into the future. Blanchard tested and successfully implemented backup and recovery services using TOLIS' BRU-Pro on medium to large heterogeneous network systems used in the prepress industry. Blanchard has determined that this certified implementation of BRU-Pro, used in conjunction with an ultra-reliable Linux tape server, is significant because of TOLIS' meticulous attention to detail. BRU-Pro writes its archive catalogs to tape headers as well as the tape server's hard disk. Should that hard disk be lost, re-creation of the catalogs is virtually automatic, allowing the industry's fastest renewed access to the archived data. "As digital advertising and computer-to-plate and direct-to-press workflows become increasingly prevalent, the ability to recover critical data quickly and easily is essential in pre-press environments," says Charles Blanchard, president and CEO of Blanchard Systems. "With fast deadlines and the amount of labor invested in graphics files, the last thing a prepress department wants to do is rebuild its work. That's why we chose the proven reliability and broad feature set of the BRU technology for our Vortex Storage Solution." The unique format of the BRU technology audits every bit archived to deliver unsurpassed reliability by assuring that each backup is accurate, and the data can be successfully recovered whenever needed. In addition to the reliability requirement, the characteristics of the graphics-laden data in the prepress industry tax backup software's capabilities. The image files are exceptionally large in size, and are usually created in a format that is not software compressible. BRU is ideally suited to Blanchard's needs because its architecture does not limit the size of files that can be backed-up - an imperative issue for exceptionally large graphics files. When backing up non-compressible files, BRU's exceptionally low overhead allows for the fastest backup times by unleashing the throughput capability of the Vortex archival subsystem. "Today, lost data in the form of computer graphics adds to the consequences a business incurs when those graphics need to be re-created. The underlying creative element is lost as well, and quite often that's irreplaceable. BRU's data protection virtually eliminates the issue of re-creation," said Tim Jones, president of the TOLIS Group. "We're very pleased Blanchard has chosen BRU to support their fine line of solutions." Vortex solutions implementing standalone tape devices will use BRU Workstation 17.0 to protect critical information. BRU-Pro 2.0 will be used to support Vortex solutions implementing tape libraries in larger application environments.