posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 6:01 AM
File and data storage continues to be a challenge for IT departments trying to manage the ever increasing growth of information. Users are always creating new data on a daily basis and regulatory requirements demand the preservation of information for longer periods of time. Capacity demands are growing yet adding new storage devices can increase complexity and costs. Many storage infrastructures consist of a mix of vendors that do not always work seamlessly together and users are statically mapped to physical file storage resources which can be disrupted when new devices are introduced or when files are moved. Updates can cause downtime due to the manual nature of static configurations. Finally, many companies overprovision storage capacity to meet the growing demands in the enterprise and costs can escalate quickly, especially for mid-size organizations.
This week, F5 announced the new ARX Solution Portfolio, Delivering Enterprise-Class File Virtualization to Mid-Range Storage Environments on the ARX2000.
‘Designed especially to meet the scalability and performance needs of mid-to-large size storage environments, the ARX2000 enables these organizations to more effectively address rapid data growth while reducing the cost and complexity of data management.’
File virtualization creates a logical, virtual representation of your storage environment, which eliminates the rigid mapping between clients and physical file location. This virtualized environment enables simple logical access to physical file systems without introducing a new file system. ARX file virtualization solutions act as a proxy to federate the file systems that are already in place on the underlying storage layer enabling IT organizations to automate and enforce data management policies in real time. The ARX Data Management Operating System v5.1 enhanced support for Microsoft/CIFS storage environments which enables greater scalability for tier 2 deduplication platforms. With the ARX2000, customers now have several ARX platforms to choose from, depending on their needs:
- ARX500 and ARX1000 for small to mid-size storage environments
- ARX2000 for mid-size environments: twice the virtualization scale & connectivity as the ARX1000
- ARX4000 for large environments
George Crump, Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland says, "Getting the right data on the right tier at the right time has just been too user intensive. Administrators need a simpler and more effective method to move data seamlessly between tiers of storage, especially in the resource-constrained medium sized data center. File virtualization products like the ARX2000 should be a top consideration for these storage managers looking to realize the full ROI potential of storage tiering."
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