03/10/2004

Gold Wire Technology, a developer of infrastructure integrity assurance solutions, says Staples (NASDAQ: SPLS) has deployed Gold Wire Technology's Formulator management appliance for enhanced control of its distributed computing network serving nearly 1,600 Staples retail locations in North America and Europe.

“Formulator provides centralized access control, change control, and compliance verification features that help enterprises assure the integrity of the infrastructure - network devices and UNIX servers,” Gold Wire explains. “Using Formulator, Staples has reduced from days to hours the time required to ensure compliance with internal policy across nearly 1,600 network devices from Nortel Networks and other leading vendors, while providing detailed audit trails of all changes.”

“Like many enterprises,” Gold Wire continues, “Staples has policies that call for periodic changes to device access settings to conform to internal standards. Yet the sheer volume of changes to be implemented across nearly 1,600 devices on a multi-vendor network requires an automated way of managing access and configuration changes on a daily basis. Rapid rollbacks to previously known good configurations are essential in the event of an outage, but previously required an arduous process to back-up configurations, detect changes, and then restore settings when errors occur. Supporting Staples' network devices with binary configurations - which are much more complex than standard text-based configurations - also presented a challenge.

“Gold Wire's Formulator has streamlined network administration at Staples by allowing network administrators to change access settings for any or all network devices enterprise-wide in a single Formulator session. Network administrators can perform global network device access setting resets from multiple vendors in hours - resets that formerly required days to implement - significantly enhancing operating effectiveness.

“Formulator also centrally captures configuration changes and notifies network management that changes have occurred. Such up-to-the-minute archives allow rapid restoration to individual devices, device groups or the entire network, improving overall business continuity by reducing mean-time-to-repair and disaster recovery time.

“Formulator captures even binary configurations as well as text-based configurations, and swiftly restores them to meet Staples' network demands. Formulator's centralized archives also provide vital forensic audit trails of who made what change, when - so network staffs can swiftly demonstrate compliance to security policies with the convenience of Formulator's easy-to-deploy appliance format,” Gold Wire concludes.