World's Largest Equipment Rental Company Implements Acopia Solution To Automate Data Management Across Storage Tiers And Replicate Data To Disaster Recovery Site
Lowell, MA - September 6, 2006 - Acopia Networks®, the leader in high-performance, intelligent file virtualization, today announced that United Rentals, Inc. (NYSE: URI), the world's largest equipment rental company, has successfully deployed Acopia ARX™ systems as the foundation for its information lifecycle management (ILM) and disaster recovery (DR) efforts. Today, Acopia ARX systems are in use supporting United Rentals' data migration, tiered storage, and disaster recovery efforts.
The Acopia systems were used to migrate more than four terabytes (4 TBs) of data, transparently and non-disruptively, from legacy hardware to new network-attached storage (NAS) devices within United Rentals' primary datacenter.
United Rentals then used the Acopia solution to automate tiered storage policies across their file storage environment. Under United Rentals' policy, data over one year old is now automatically moved to Tier 2 SATA disk, freeing Tier 1 resources for business critical data, and resulting in a cost savings of more than 50 percent in hardware alone. In addition, rather than spending time manually tuning storage utilization as they had before, storage administrators are now focusing their efforts on more important business initiatives.
United Rentals is also now using the Acopia systems to replicate data from its primary datacenter to a remote site. By replicating only Tier 1 data, Acopia reduced the replication time between sites by more than 70 percent. Acopia's heterogeneous replication capability allowed United Rentals to achieve significant additional savings by reusing older storage systems - recently retired from the primary datacenter - as disaster recovery targets.
"The migration to Acopia was seamless and fast," said Bonnie Stiewing, senior systems administrator at United Rentals. "Acopia's switches reduced the size of the data set we actively manage, creating operational efficiencies. We estimate that Acopia has reduced our total backup and replication time by more than 70 percent. By deploying Acopia's ARX solutions, we have optimized our storage network investments, greatly simplified our storage management practices, and significantly lowered our overall storage costs."
"We believe file virtualization will significantly change the storage landscape. Today, end user companies are using this technology to improve access to their data, and IT managers can manage their NAS environments with far greater effect and ease," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "Acopia is one of the pioneers in this space and are building real momentum and customer traction. I have spoken to Acopia customers that are using its ARX solution within massive NAS environments and others that have one or two NAS systems. Regardless of the size of the environment the Acopia solution scales to meet the needs of the business and provides the intelligence and capability to solve real problems."
"Today, no thoughtful customer will settle for a disposable, unintelligent data migration tool. The challenges of managing unstructured data are much more complex than simply moving data from one system to another. Sophisticated customers, such as United Rentals, realize that file virtualization is the key to unlocking the value of their storage investments, while managing their overall storage growth," said Mike Connolly, vice president of US sales for Acopia. "Through its skilful deployment of Acopia solutions, United Rentals now manages data on its own terms; lowering costs, extending the value of existing investments, and dramatically accelerating business processes. We are proud to serve them."
United Rentals, Inc. is the largest equipment rental company in the world, with an integrated network of more than 760 rental locations in 48 states, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The company's 14,000 employees serve construction and industrial customers, utilities, municipalities, homeowners and others. The company offers for rent over 20,000 classes of rental equipment with a total original cost of $4.2 billion. United Rentals is a member of the Standard & Poor's MidCap 400 Index and the Russell 2000 Index® and is headquartered in Greenwich, Conn. Additional information about United Rentals is available at unitedrentals.com.
Acopia Networks is the leader in high-performance, intelligent file virtualization. Its family of Adaptive Resource Switches (ARX™) 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 switches help IT executives to reduce management overhead and accelerate business workflow.
For further information about Acopia's products and services, please visit its Website at 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.
Contacts:
Nicole Gorman
Acopia Networks, Inc.
508-397-0131
ngorman@acopia.com
Nicole Salas
United Rentals
203-618-7246
nsalas@ur.com