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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Storage:
Acopia Switches Offer Global Management Of Unstructured Data
Acopia Networks introduced the industry's first high performance switching
platforms that enable enterprises to globally access, manage and optimize
unstructured data while better utilizing their existing server and storage
infrastructures. The new products, the ARX6000 and ARX1000, couple
sophisticated client presentation and storage utilization capabilities with
powerful enterprise-wide file distribution to transform today's data centers
into "on-demand" resources for global applications. The Acopia products are
being deployed by leading enterprise organizations including Merrill Lynch and
Warner Music.
Based on Adaptive Resource Networking technology, Acopia's products are
purpose-built to leverage standard IP networks to provide global scale. The
standards-based ARX switches work across the heterogeneous, multi-vendor
systems already in use today, and require no additional software to be
installed on the client desktops or storage systems. In addition, the new
products employ sophisticated policy-enforcement technology which dynamically
manages the placement and migration of data, thereby significantly reducing
capital and operational expenses in the data center and throughout all remote
sites.
"Managing unstructured data, and its associated IT infrastructure, is clearly
one of the most daunting tasks for CIOs in large enterprises today," said
Christopher Lynch, president and CEO of Acopia. "Our customers report that up
to 85 percent of their business information exists as unstructured file data,
and most of their initiatives to virtualize the infrastructure, and improve
the capital and operational costs, don't apply to this unstructured data. Our
Adaptive Resource Switches are designed specifically to solve this problem,
regardless of whether that data resides in the next room or across the world."
Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of Enterprise Storage Group,
added, "As unstructured data balloons to such a large proportion of all data
stored in enterprises today, CIOs are being forced to manage it as part of the
data center infrastructure, not just as content. Existing approaches aren't
well suited to handle the breadth and scale of files that exist within many
enterprises today. Acopia's ARX products are the most innovative technology
we've seen that address the significant challenges of unstructured data on a
global scale."
Merrill Lynch, Warner Music and other enterprises with large, global data
center infrastructures plan to deploy the new ARX switches as part of their
broad adaptive infrastructure initiatives. The applications within these
initiatives include server consolidation, global namespace for clients, data
life cycle management, data migration to classes of storage, capacity
balancing and enterprise-wide file services.
"Merrill Lynch plans to move to an adaptive IT infrastructure to consolidate
its worldwide data centers and reduce its total cost of ownership," said Andy
Brown, chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch. "Acopia's Adaptive
Resource Switches enable this transformation by consolidating the back-end
data store while providing global data access to users without disruption. Its
network-based approach enables the use of best-in-class file systems,
eliminates costly desktop re-configurations, and automatically migrates data
without manual intervention or costly application disruption."
Simplifying Client Presentation
Unstructured data typically is stored across a variety of network-attached
storage servers that are uniquely mapped to clients and are difficult to
centrally manage. Today's users must navigate a maze of mapped drives or mount
points for file data that is logically related but is distributed across
distinct physical servers. As new file servers are added user mount points
grow while changes to the server infrastructure requires user downtime and
re-configuration.
Acopia's ARX products enable the aggregation of multi-vendor file storage into
a logical pool that is presented as a single access point, often called a
global namespace. In addition, the products virtualize the file storage
infrastructure, transparently mapping client requests to the appropriate
storage resources. This allows users to always have a global view of data,
irrespective of location or system dependencies, and means that there is no
disruption to users with adds/moves or changes to back-end storage devices.
Acopia's customers report that this simplified client presentation will reduce
the operational cost of managing their desktops by 50 percent or more.
Improving Storage Utilization and Management
The ARX products consolidate heterogeneous, distributed islands of file
storage into a unified global storage pool, reclaiming stranded capacity and
employing intelligent policies to better optimize costly storage resources.
For example, files/directories migrate from a resource with limited free space
to one with available free space without application disruption. Acopia's
customers report that this utilization improvement is as much as 30 percent or
more, providing substantial capital expenditure improvement.
Storage "classes" can also be defined to economically manage data commensurate
with its value to the organization, enabling the infrastructure to adopt data
lifecycle management characteristics. Acopia's ARX products dynamically
migrate data to appropriate classes of storage, thereby freeing up costly
high-end storage resources/capacity within existing systems, and providing
alternative storage purchasing options.
Expanding Services Globally with Data Distribution
Acopia's ARX products, when interconnected, scale to a global level, providing
an on-demand infrastructure across the enterprise. This allows users and
applications to transparently access data regardless of the physical location
of storage resources, while automatically optimizing the placement of data to
improve the performance of applications. This intelligent data distribution
capability also enables enterprises to improve backup/recovery processes,
disaster recovery mechanisms, and to reduce the amount of data duplication
that occurs today.
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