Intelligent File Virtualization Technology Delivers Impressive Performance Improvement
Lowell, MA - October 24, 2006 - Acopia Networks®, the leader in high performance intelligent file virtualization, today announced that it is the first company to deliver a solution to enable a new high performance storage tier - now recognized as "Tier 0." The new solution automatically places specific "hot" file sets in a pool of high-performance Tier 0 storage devices using Acopia's award winning ARX intelligent file virtualization systems. Tier 0 serves file sets at memory speeds, producing impressive performance gains and making the new solution particularly valuable for applications such as graphics rendering, financial analysis, software development and semiconductor design.
The idea of establishing a performance tier was recently explored by Taneja Group analyst Brad O'Neill in a ground breaking editorial entitled, "Performance Caching: Your New Tier 0," which appeared on October 11, 2006 on SearchStorage.com. In the article, O'Neill explains that traditional tiered storage, or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), solutions typically focus on reducing capacity and cost. He suggests that creative application of similar technology can now produce incredible performance breakthroughs as well.
Acopia already leads the industry in heterogeneous real-time automation of file storage for the traditional purpose of managing storage growth and reducing costs. With this new solution, Acopia is now leading the industry again by introducing solutions that embrace the concept of tiering data for the specific purpose of optimizing performance as well.
Foster and Partners - an international studio for architecture, planning, and design, whose work ranges from the largest construction project on the planet - the Beijing International airport, to the new World Trade Center (Tower 2) in New York City - is currently deploying the Acopia ARX to achieve "Tier 0" performance.
"With the Acopia ARX, we are seeing incredible improvements in response times and the ability to manage active, semi active, and inactive data in the most efficient and cost effective manner. Most vendors talk about ILM as a way to save us money, and we definitely see that benefit with Acopia, however only Acopia has had the foresight to offer automated tiering to dramatically improve our performance as well," said Mark Read, infrastructure manager, associate, Foster and Partners. "The ability to apply full compute power to solve complex challenges means faster time to results and ultimately, greater customer satisfaction. In fact, we believe Foster and Partners' effective utilization of advanced technology, such as Acopia's ARX, is a key competitive advantage."
"Conventional thinking had held that storage performance problems are best tackled with costly "Tier 1" disk storage. But what customers really need is simple access with ample throughput, and that is what Acopia is delivering today with 'Tier 0'," said ProgresSmart founder and prominent industry analyst, Dan Tanner.
In Acopia laboratory tests, when a specific application file set was served from Tier 0 , the application throughput increased by almost 30 times compared to similar tests run with the same file set residing on a popular modern NAS system. Amazingly, the Tier 0 storage pool created for the test consisted solely of a single off-the-shelf server configured with 32GB memory and dual Intel® processors. The cost of this configuration was under $10,000. Given the cost difference between the popular NAS system and the Tier 0 storage pool, the Tier 0 enabled solution was 300x more cost effective than the popular NAS system alone when serving this workload.
"Acopia is continuing to help our leading edge customers, such as Foster and Partners, to stay ahead of their competition by providing them with the ability to apply low cost technology to solve their most challenging, complex problems," said Kirby Wadsworth, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Acopia. "Moreover, because new industry standard servers now support massive memory configurations, we are accomplishing this with commodity hardware, resulting in incomparable price/performance improvements."
Acopia will be discussing Tier 0 implementation using its ARX solutions in Booth C36 at Storage Networking World, taking place next week, October 31 - November 3, at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes Resort in Orlando, Florida. A white paper outlining results of the Tier 0 lab tests will be distributed at the show. Copies are also available on Acopia's website, or by contacting Acopia directly.
Acopia ARX™ systems simplify file storage management - making it easier than ever for companies to migrate, tier, balance, and replicate file data across the entire enterprise storage environment. Specifically, Acopia ARX intelligent file virtualization provides customers with the ability to:
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Migrate large numbers of files, transparently to users, without scheduled outages,
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Tier data to appropriate storage media automatically and continuously - freeing expensive high-performance disk and dramatically reducing storage and backup costs
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Increase utilization and optimize performance with advanced real-time load balancing
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Replicate data efficiently and flexibly to ensure data protection and high availability
Acopia Networks is the leader in high performance intelligent file virtualization. Its family of ARX systems help customers manage the growth, complexity and cost of unstructured, globally distributed, file-based information. By providing automatic, policy-driven, data migration, tiering, load balancing, and replication across multi-vendor storage environments, the ARX systems help IT executives to reduce management overhead and accelerate business workflow.
For further information about Acopia's products and services, please visit http://www.acopia.com/,call 978-513-2900 (US) / 49-89-944-90-165 (Europe) or email info@acopia.com.
© 2006 Acopia Networks, Inc. Acopia is a trademark of Acopia Networks. All other brands, products, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.
Contact:
Nicole Gorman
Acopia Networks, Inc.
508-397-0131
ngorman@acopia.com