F5 Acopia ARX500

F5 Acopia ARX500 ... administration and automating many storage management tasks. The result is a dramatic improvement in cost, agility, and business efficiency.

In addition, ARX removes many inherent barriers to infrastructure change by eliminating vendor lock-in and giving businesses the freedom to choose file storage technologies that best meet their business and IT requirements.

At the heart of the ARX is a technology known as file virtualization. File virtualization creates a logical abstraction of the physical storage environment. This presentation layer, also referred to as a Global Namespace, enables simple, logical access to physical file systems and hides storage changes from clients. As a result, organizations can move their data at any time with no disruption to users or applications.

ARX does not introduce a new file system into the storage environment, but acts as a proxy to federate file systems that are already in place in the underlying storage layer. It uses industry-standard file access protocols - CIFS and NFS - to communicate with both the clients accessing files and the storage servers providing them.

ARX enables IT organizations to automate and enforce data management policies in real time. Operations that were once done manually can now be performed automatically, without visibility or disruption to users and applications. This significantly extends the value of existing storage investments and enhances business workflow in three key areas: automated storage tiering, non-disruptive data migration, and dynamic capacity balancing.