Industry Visionary and Serial Entrepreneur, Cheng Wu, Acopia's Founder and Chairman of the Board, Outlines Storage Networking Paradigm Shift and Industry Response
Lowell, MA - October 30, 2006 - Acopia Networks®, Inc., the leader in high performance intelligent file virtualization, today announced its file area networking (FAN) vision and product direction. As defined by founder and chairman, Cheng Wu, Acopia's FAN roadmap details plans to leverage intelligence in the network, simplifying management, and optimizing delivery of file-based information assets.
With files now the pervasive method for managing business data, Wu recognized the need for a unified file management strategy - a new enterprise-wide architectural and methodological approach delivering both scale and scope. Leveraging file virtualization, network based policy enforcement, and globally distributed access, Acopia's FAN architecture is inclusive and open so that partners and customers can easily integrate with and build upon it.
This technology and market shift is analogous to changes that took place in the 1990s, as storage area networks (SANs) became a popular means to improve heterogeneity and capacity provisioning for block-mode data. SANs offered some relief to rapid growth by virtualizing the physical connections between the servers and storage devices. In the pursuing years, SANs became a multi-billion dollar global market. Today the problems of growth and complexity are similar; however, the challenge is now managing file-based information rather than raw blocks.
"Files are very different than blocks," said Dave Russell, research vice president, Gartner. "They have a business context. In other words, the metadata can be used to apply policies to the file - for instance how long to keep data, where to store it, when to shred it, etc... - this view of metadata can only be accomplished with an approach that is file-aware, such as a FAN, which can provide great value to customers." He continued, "I look forward to following this marketplace as it evolves."
"We have a complexity crisis in unstructured data that necessitates a paradigm shift. Without any changes, new application approaches such as SOA and dynamic web content, when coupled with unrelenting growth rates, will break traditional file-based architectures within the next 3 years," said Brad O'Neill, senior analyst and consultant with The Taneja Group, and an early FAN proponent. "Acopia's approach to file virtualization is an excellent example of how the new FAN-centric paradigm will resolve these issues: Leverage the network, thinking globally about file controls, and provide optimal scale and flexibility. This is where the market is heading and Acopia is driving this trend."
"Indeed, the rapid growth of file data, and new applications - such as Web 2.0 and SOA, which imply dynamic configuration of static data - is creating a complexity crisis which necessitates a network resident solution," explained Wu. "An effectively deployed FAN will include: 1) heterogeneous support for a common management framework that is future-proofed against architectural choices over time; 2) fine-grained, real-time policy-based controls across the entire infrastructure; and 3) network residency. It will allow servers and applications to deploy particular tools as required, regardless of platform, while allowing the storage layer to expand in a completely open fashion. Moreover, this must all be accomplished in a gradual deployment - customers cannot be asked to establish an entirely new file infrastructure."
Today, Acopia delivers:
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The only heterogeneous FAN fabric available on the market
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The only real-time policy enforcement for FAN
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The first global unified namespace for FAN
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The first set of FAN management and control services
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Leadership in driving FAN related industry standards
Perhaps the greatest promise of the FAN is that file storage - whether its file servers or NAS systems, from heterogeneous vendors - can be networked in an intelligent fashion to make discrete and individual assets greater than the sum of their parts. FAN enables intelligent and transparent movement between different tiers of storage, centralized data protection, load balancing, etc..., that significantly reduces cost and complexity," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "ESG feels that file and object level awareness and virtualization are core requirements for all of storage networking in the future and Acopia is well-positioned to be a leader in this paradigm."
Acopia will be offering demonstrations of its ARX solutions in a FAN deployment at this week's Storage Networking World, Fall 2006, taking place October 31 - November 3, at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes Resort in Orlando, Florida, in Booth C36.
In addition, Acopia customer, Alfredo Villalobos, of Telefónica International, will be a featured participant on an End-User Insights Panel, moderated by Paul Saffo, forecaster, strategist, and director, of the Institute for the Future, taking place on Wednesday, November 1, from 11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Senior IT executives from Special Olympics, Market Street Mortgage, and Turner Broadcasting will join Villalobos on the panel.
Learn more about how FAN, bolstered by intelligent file virtualization, will dramatically change file management and eliminate some of today's most difficult file management challenges, in the recently published report entitled, "Intelligent File Virtualization and the FAN Paradigm," available at: http://searchstorage.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1159445967_652.html.
About Cheng Wu
Prior to founding Acopia in 2002, industry visionary and serial entrepreneur, Cheng Wu founded and subsequently sold Arrowpoint Communications, a leading Web switching company, to Cisco Systems for $5.7 Billion in 2000. Prior to the sale, Mr. Wu was the technical visionary behind Arrowpoint's innovative intelligent L4-7 load balancing switches, optimized for e-commerce and content delivery capabilities. After the sale, Mr. Wu held various executive management positions at Cisco Systems, including group vice president, general manager and vice president of strategy for Cisco's Content and Multi-Service Edge Group. Prior to founding Arrowpoint, he founded Arris Networks, a developer of high-density Internet access products, which he subsequently sold to Cascade Communications (now Lucent Technologies) for $150 million in 1996, just seven months after founding. Mr. Wu holds a Bachelor's Degree in electrical engineering from ChiaoTung University, Taiwan and a Master's Degree in computer science from Indiana University.
Acopia Networks, Inc. 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