Leading Storage Hardware and Software Vendors From Around the Globe Empower Customers through Freedom of Choice
Lowell, MA (April 10, 2007) - Acopia Networks® Inc., the leader in high-performance intelligent file virtualization, today announced the official launch of the FreedomFabric™ Alliance, bringing together technology providers with the common goal of helping customers to meet the mounting challenge of managing globally distributed, unstructured, file-based information. Premier members of the alliance include: 3PAR, Acronis, agámi Systems, DataDirect Networks, Dot Hill, Exanet, Incipient, MagnaView, ONStor, Permabit, Pillar Data Systems, Plasmon, Quantum, Scentric, StoredIQ, Texas Memory Systems, and WysDM Software.
The FreedomFabric Alliance builds upon Acopia's existing relationships with industry partners such as IBM, EMC, Sun Microsystems, BlueArc, Symantec, and Hewlett-Packard. The new program offers technology vendors the opportunity to participate in Acopia's multi-million dollar "Freedom Lab" where their technologies will be demonstrated within customer solutions. Fully integrated with Acopia's ARX™ series and FreedomFabric™ network operating system, these customer solutions offer seamless migration, automated tiering/ILM, application acceleration, and advanced data protection. Customers benefit from the ease with which FreedomFabric Alliance partner solutions can reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX), and improve business efficiency.
"The idea for the FreedomFabric Alliance Program emerged over coffee with one of our customers," explained Kirby Wadsworth, Acopia's senior vice president of marketing and business development. "She drew us a diagram on a napkin and said, 'It's simple. On the one hand, raw disk capacity prices are plummeting, but the price we pay for storage is actually going up. On the other hand, all this great new technology is coming into the market that would be a real boon to us if we could make use of it without disrupting our existing operations. Acopia is in the perfect position to change all that. We need you to step in and make it happen.'"
The goal of the program is to align the best interest of the alliance member to the best interest of the customer. The program is grounded on the belief that all customers should have freedom of choice - the freedom to choose the right technology, at the right price, at the right time, based solely on business need.
"Customers are looking to solve their IT challenges, while reducing complexity. It is important for customers to see proof that proposals work in real environments, and not just on paper," said Russ Fellows, analyst, Evaluator Group, Inc. "The FreedomFabric Alliance program will provide customers with a way to validate that solutions can be integrated into their computing environment, and more importantly will deliver real business results."
"The program is open to hardware, software, and services vendors, as well as other ecosystem members willing to demonstrate a commitment to customers that they too believe in this freedom," said Wadsworth. "By joining together to help customers solve the very real problems of burgeoning file data, each alliance member also benefits - from larger market opportunities, faster sales cycles, and improved competitive positioning. What's good for the customer is ultimately good for all of us."
For additional information on Acopia's FreedomFabric Alliance Partner Program, please email: alliance@acopia.com.
The Acopia FreedomFabric Alliance includes:
3PAR
3PAR is the leading provider of Utility Storage, a simple, efficient and massively scalable tiered-storage array for utility computing that lets customers serve more with less. 3PAR Utility Storage can cut an organization's Total Cost of Data by 50%. Capacity and related costs can be cut by 75% while storage administration and associated expenses can be reduced by 90%. 3PAR Utility Storage is ideal for open systems storage consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management and performance-intensive applications. 3PAR is based in Fremont, California, and has offices in Bracknell, UK, Stuttgart, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan. The company's corporate headquarters are located at 4209 Technology Drive, Fremont, CA 94538. Phone: 510-413-5999, fax: 510-354-3070, email: salesinfo@3pardata.com, Web site: http://www.3par.com.
"We have many customers who have consolidated their block and file-based capacity needs on 3PAR's highly virtualized utility storage platform," said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing, 3PAR. "By joining with Acopia under its FreedomFabric Alliance, we will be able to offer customers a combination of utility storage technologies built on virtualization to eliminate the complexities of traditional file management and storage administration."
Acronis
Acronis is a world leader in providing advanced, scalable storage management and disaster recovery software that helps enterprises safeguard their information and assures the availability, security, integrity and recoverability of their infrastructure. Acronis' patented disk imaging and disk management technology have won broad industry acclaim and numerous awards for excellence in data protection, backup and recovery, system deployment, and server migration for both physical and virtual machine servers. Its flagship product, Acronis True Image, is a leading commercial disk-imaging and bare-metal restore solution for Windows and Linux servers, as well as an automated system portability and migration tool. Since 2002, Acronis True Image has been the solution of choice for tens of thousands of customers, from small to mid-size businesses to the Fortune 500 in the banking, professional services, healthcare, technology, retail, government and manufacturing markets. A global company, Acronis has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia and sells its products both direct and through enterprise resellers. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com or contact Senior Director of Strategic Marketing Stephen Lawton at stephen.lawton@acronis.com.
"Most of today's IT executives are recognizing that they have already or soon will be, outgrowing their existing file data storage resources, from both a capacity and manageability standpoint. We hear time and again that they need a solution that will allow them to leverage existing technology investments, thus helping them to avoid significant future capital expenditures," said Zorian Rotenberg, director of business development, Acronis. "We are confident that Acopia technology will meet the rigorous standards of our customers, and help them to meet these challenges head-on. Moreover, the easy integration of Acronis and Acopia technology will provide customers with one of the most advanced and scalable storage management and disaster recovery solutions available on the market today."
agámi Systems
agámi Systems is the leading provider of enterprise network storage systems with integrated live file system replication. The agámi Information Server delivers breakthrough performance and unprecedented cost savings for geographically distributed business-critical applications. By unlocking the bottlenecks of NAS performance, agámi Information Servers enable fast, efficient storage for large-scale file and database applications. agámi Systems solutions integrate seamlessly into customers' existing infrastructure and applications and are compatible with the leading enterprise storage management software products. Only agámi Information Servers deliver the most cost-effective way for enterprises to safely share and protect information from remote locations. To find out more about agámi Systems, visit www.agami.com.
"We have been hearing from customers for some time that they view file management as a top priority for their IT organizations. However, these same customers report that traditional approaches for helping them to manage the growth, complexity, and cost of their unstructured, file-based information are no longer meeting their needs," said Paul Speciale, vice president, product management and marketing, agámi. "By combining agámi's Information Server technology - the first enterprise-class integrated NAS system with live file system replication, and the first NAS to break the GB/second performance barrier with breakthrough levels of TCO - 4-6x higher performance, with Acopia's revolutionary ARX series of file virtualization platforms, featuring its FreedomFabric OS, customers will reap the dramatic benefits, including: greater performance, capacity density, power, cooling, scalability, and TCO/ROI, than ever before."
DataDirect Networks
DataDirect Networks is the world's leading provider of high performance, high capacity network storage solutions. DDN's S2A (Silicon Storage Appliance) storage architecture enables applications that place unusually high demands on storage system performance and capacity, such as video streaming, content delivery, modeling and simulation, backup and archiving, cluster and supercomputing, and real-time collaborative workflows. DataDirect's customers utilize our S2A technology and solutions to solve their most challenging storage requirements, including providing shared, high-speed access to a common pool of data, minimizing data center footprints and storage costs for massive archives, reducing simulation computational, load, and save times, and capturing and serving multiple streams of high-quality audio and video. Our customers include the world's leading high-performance computing centers, broadcast and post production facilities, Internet sites, telecommunications providers, and government agencies. Launched in 1998 and headquartered in Chatsworth, California, DataDirect Networks has an established global presence with research and development, and operations in the United States, Europe, and Asia. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at 818-700-7600 or info@datadirectnet.com. To learn more about DataDirect Networks, visit www.datadirectnet.com.
"DataDirect Networks is delighted to join the Acopia partner ecosystem to help storage users to meet their high-performance application requirements more quickly and efficiently than ever before - resulting in faster time to results and faster time to market capabilities," said Paul Bloch, president and founder, DataDirect Networks. "By combining DataDirect's high-performance, high-capacity Silicon Storage Appliance with Acopia's intelligent storage virtualization solutions, customers will benefit from incomparable price/performance possibilities."
Dot Hill
Delivering innovative technology and global support, Dot Hill empowers the OEM community to bring unique storage solutions to market, quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Offering high performance and industry-leading uptime, Dot Hill's RAID technology is the foundation for best-in-class storage solutions offering enterprise-class security, availability and data protection. The company's products are in use today by the world's leading service and equipment providers, common carriers, advanced technology and telecommunications companies as well as government agencies. Dot Hill solutions are certified to meet rigorous industry standards and military specifications, as well as RoHS and WEEE international environmental standards. Headquartered in Carlsbad, Calif., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States. For more information, visit us at www.dothill.com.
"The Acopia FreedomFabric Alliance makes perfect sense for Dot Hill, our OEM partners, and certainly for customers, most of whom are facing significant challenges around how best to overcome such hurdles as how to manage increasingly complex storage infrastructures and low utilization rates, as well as data migration, consolidation, scale, and performance issues," said Cooper Cowart, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. "Our participation in Acopia's FreedomFabric Alliance underscores our commitment to bring our customers the most advanced data storage management solutions that are both easy to deploy and highly cost effective."
Exanet
Exanet's clustered NAS solution delivers a new data storage paradigm to address the trends that are driving the future of data centers: virtualization, standardized hardware, and applications demanding the most extreme standards of performance, availability and scalability. Exanet's software-based open architecture delivers the best price/performance in the industry, dramatically increased utilization and, for the first time, offers a no end-of-life storage solution. Exanet has been adopted by customers ranging from traditional enterprises such as manufacturing and graphic arts to next generation ventures including telecom, active archiving, digital broadcasting, video surveillance and storage service providers, with well over 2.3 PB of content managed by Exanet software. With headquarters in Israel, US headquarters in New York and offices in Europe and the Pacific Rim, Exanet sells its flagship ExaStore - ICM (Intelligent Cluster Management) solution through its channel partners worldwide. www.exanet.com.
According to Rami Schwartz, Exanet CEO, "Acopia Networks and Exanet address critical enterprise customer storage management challenges such as the ability to keep up with growing corporate data while staying within budget. Exanet's ExaStore clustered NAS solution and Acopia's FreedomFabric V2.5 virtualization software are non-proprietary and address complexity and spiraling demands on IT resources. The combination of these two technologies presents a unique blended storage solution at a very attractive entry point."
Incipient
Incipient, Inc. is a leading provider of patented storage virtualization and data migration software that simplifies management and drives down the total cost of ownership for enterprise SAN environments. The Incipient Network Storage Platform is a scalable, enterprise-class solution that is made up of a suite of storage services software such as non-disruptive data migration, network volume management, and copy services. For more information, please visit http://www.incipient.com.
"While Acopia concentrates on file-based storage virtualization and Incipient on block-based storage virtualization, the synergies are clear. We both recognize that storage virtualization is the ideal means by which enterprise datacenters can achieve dramatic reductions in the operational and capital expenses directly tied to total cost of ownership," said Robert Infantino, senior vice president, marketing and alliances, Incipient, Inc. "We are delighted and proud to be named among the Alliance's premier members."
MagnaView
MagnaView (www.magnaview.nl; Eindhoven, the Netherlands) delivers innovative, visual data analysis and presentation tools. MagnaView's Explorer and Designer tools offers users the possibility to visually inspect and analyze data, and to convincingly present the results of the analysis in a rich, visual way. MagnaView started as a company in 2003, based on the success of SequoiaView, a freeware tool which visualizes the content of a hard disk. SequoiaView was downloaded by more than 600.000 users, and is regarded as one of the major successes in the field of visualization. MagnaView's tools can be applied in many domains; applications in file virtualization are close to MagnaView's roots.
"File data has become the lifeblood of most enterprises across the globe. However until recently, an efficient and cost effective solution for managing its explosive growth has simply not been available," said Erik-Jan van der Linden, CEO, MagnaView. "By combining MagnaView's visual analysis and presentation tools with Acopia's file virtualization solutions, customers will have a solution that is extremely user-friendly and delivers immediate ROI." He continued, "We are proud to be named among the founding members of the Acopia FreedomFabric Alliance."
ONStor
ONStor drives down the cost of storage management by delivering scalable clustered NAS that saves enterprises 50 percent on total cost of ownership with systems that let customers start small and scale massively as their requirements grow. ONStor's award-winning Pantera Clustered NAS Systems and Bobcat NAS Gateways consolidate information from multiple Windows, UNIX and Linux devices into a single, highly scalable file storage environment. The open storage architecture allows existing assets to be leveraged, while integrated file server virtualization enables resources to be redeployed quickly to accommodate changing needs. Proven at hundreds of enterprise customer sites, ONStor delivers the cost-effective approach to scalable storage. More information about ONStor can be found at www.onstor.com or by calling toll-free 877-2ON-STOR (877-266-7867).
"Enterprises today have massive amounts of unstructured file data isolated in islands of storage from different vendors, across different tiers. The lack of a unified management framework for this data results in an expensive combination of poor resource utilization and escalating management costs," said Narayan Venkat, vice president of marketing, ONStor. "As a provider of Scalable Clustered NAS solutions, ONStor enables large scale consolidation across heterogeneous tiered storage, allowing businesses to start small and grow their system as needs change. By joining the Acopia ecosystem, ONStor ensures that joint customers are able to manage unstructured data holistically to improve operational efficiency. ONStor customers can leverage Acopia's file virtualization solutions in conjunction with ONStor's Scalable Clustered NAS platform to deploy a flexible and intelligent file management infrastructure that minimizes management costs and maximizes utilization rates."
Permabit
Permabit, of Cambridge, MA, helps organizations to efficiently retain, locate, retrieve, and validate information, protecting your information assets and your business. Its Dynamic Information Services platform enables VARs, OEMS and others to deliver "Permabit Secure" information protection and access to a broad range of enterprise applications. Permabit's platform is the first comprehensive, non-disruptive disk-based solution for meeting compliance, governance and retention, retrieval and security requirements for information storage. For more information visit www.permabit.com.
"IT decision-makers are a smart group and they understand that the new generation of compliance, archive, and tiered storage solutions offers tremendous potential for improving their capital and operational expenses," said Wayne Salpietro, director of marketing for Permabit. "Acopia's FreedomFabric Alliance program is an opportunity for confident vendors to demonstrate and prove that they fully understand the concerns of their potential customers and are prepared to address them. More importantly, it gives IT planners the means to practically evaluate Permabit's compliance, archive, and tiered storage solutions in a multi-dimensional operating environment."
Pillar Data Systems
Founded in 2001, Pillar Data Systems develops midrange and enterprise network storage systems. The company's Pillar Axiom solution, driven by its innovative policy-based management capabilities, integrates SAN and NAS into a centrally managed storage platform. Pillar Axiom systems consolidate multiple tiers of enterprise network storage into a single, easily managed system capable of scaling to hundreds of terabytes of capacity. Pillar Data Systems is privately funded by Tako Ventures, LLC, the venture arm of Larry Ellison. The company is headquartered at 2840 Junction Avenue, San Jose, California 95134. The company can be reached on the Web at http://www.pillardata.com, by phone at 408-503-4000 or by email at sales@pillardata.com.
"Pillar Data Systems is pleased to be an inaugural member of Acopia's FreedomFabric Alliance partner program. We at Pillar share Acopia's commitment to customer care and to looking for ways to eliminate the unnecessary cost, complexity, and overall inefficiency of traditional data storage," said Wendell Wilson, vice president of worldwide marketing, Pillar Data Systems.
Plasmon
Plasmon is the trusted source in archiving systems and provides the most comprehensive line of archival storage solutions, including the flagship Archive Appliance product. Founded in 1984, Plasmon is listed on the London Stock Exchange, (LSE: PLM) with worldwide headquarters in Cambridge, United Kingdom and U.S. headquarters in Denver, Colorado. Plasmon offers longevity, authenticity, and ease of access to critical business data to enterprises looking to protect business assets for competitive reasons and meet regulatory compliance requirements. For more information, visit www.plasmon.com.
"By integrating the advantages of Acopia Networks' solutions and Plasmon's UDO Archive Appliance, our customers can reduce the risk of data loss, reduce storage costs, and improve overall system performance, while keeping archive costs as low as possible using this tiered storage architecture," said Marty Sos, vice president of sales, Plasmon.
Quantum
Quantum, a global leader in storage, delivers highly reliable backup, archive, and workflow solutions that meet demanding requirements for data integrity, availability, and performance. Used throughout broadcast, post-production, imaging, science and engineering applications, High Performance Computing (HPC) and other rich media operations, Quantum's leading software solutions streamline operations and intelligently archive content. The company's data management software, StorNext, creates shared storage pools for faster project completion and transparently moves content to virtualized tiers of disk and tape storage tiers for lower cost data retention and disaster recovery. Quantum also provides StorNext FX, data sharing software that connects Windows, Linux, and UNIX servers into an Apple Xsan. For further information, please visit: www.quantum.com.
Scentric
Scentric is an innovative provider of universal data classification solutions. The company's flagship solution, Scentric Destiny, is the world's first solution for cataloging, classifying and controlling all types of data regardless of where it is stored in the enterprise and is designed specifically to bridge the information gap between business users and storage administrators. Using Scentric Destiny, customers are able to make smarter decisions about their business while effectively optimizing existing storage investments, protecting intellectual capital, and translating regulatory requirements into established IT processes. Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, with a subsidiary in Pune, India, Scentric is managed by a team of storage veterans committed to solving real business problems related to the convergence of compliance and explosive data growth. Specifically, Scentric Destiny provides the following applications:
- e-Discovery for risk management, privacy compliance, and legal support
- Active archiving for retention based compliance, corporate governance, and digital records management
- Data tiering and selective migration for infrastructure optimization
"The combination of Scentric's universal data classification solution with Acopia's intelligent file virtualization brings customers new levels of control over data migration and tiering while also providing a platform for mitigating security and privacy risks, automating e-discovery activities, and translating regulatory requirements into established IT processes," said Hemant Kurande, Scentric CTO and co-founder.
StoredIQ
StoredIQ is a leading software provider of enterprise information classification and management (ICM) solutions for e-discovery, e-risk mitigation, and e-records management. Automated discovery, classification, protection, and policy actions allow organizations to meet legal requirements while reducing risk as well as storage and administrative costs. StoredIQ brings content- and context-aware intelligence and action-based policies to the information lifecycle management (ILM) process so organizations can effectively understand and manage their internal information based on business value and risk. The company was founded in 2001, is privately held and is located in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.storediq.com or call 512-334-3100.
"We see perfect alignment and synergy between Acopia's approach to file virtualization and our own approach to intelligent ICM (Information Classification and Management)," said Roland Schmidt, vice president of sales, StoredIQ. "Acopia adds 'virtual IQ' around the file container, to greatly simplify file management. Similarly, our software adds and stores 'IQ' about the file content itself, to align file management with actual business value through advanced policy automation." He continued, "By working together in the FFA, StoredIQ can utilize Acopia's file virtualization to offload much of our burden of navigating the file storage fabric in order to classify content and enforce policy. Customers can obtain multiplicative value through the combination of our technologies - intelligent and efficient management of file storage, based on business value."
Texas Memory Systems
Texas Memory Systems (http://www.texmemsys.com) manufactures the World's
Fastest Storage® and is the market leader in solid state disk technology. Their RamSan line of solid state storage is used to accelerate enterprise applications like OLTP databases, batch processes, and data warehouses, modeling and video editing up to 2500%. Founded in 1978, they sell direct to large enterprise and government organizations. They also sell through OEM and reseller partners.
"Intense file data growth, combined with new advanced applications -- such as SOA and Web 2.0, have created quite a predicament for countless customers in regards to complexity, bandwidth, and scalability limitations, as well as cost," said Woody Hutsell, executive vice president, Texas Memory Systems. "An approach that incorporates both Texas Memory Systems storage products, which deliver unmatched raw I/O's per second, with Acopia's intelligent file virtualization solutions, will allow customers to fully leverage the network, gain global file data control, as well as the optimum levels of scalability, flexibility, and performance."
WysDM Software
WysDM is the industry's first and only data protection management (DPM) supplier to offer detailed, custom analysis of the entire data protection environment, providing the most comprehensive insight into past, present and future data protection reliability, performance and compliance. Founded in 2001 by a team of storage and software executives from Goldman Sachs, Micromuse, and StorageNetworks, the company has established significant traction on the customer, partner and technology fronts, and its flagship product, WysDM for Backups™ uses the company's patent-pending Cross-Domain Correlation™ technology to enable system administrators and IT teams to analyze information collected from network, storage, system, and application domains to provide the most comprehensive, real-time backup analysis available. For more information, please visit www.wysdm.com.
"Gathering real-time information about the state and health of heterogeneous enterprise NAS environments is a complex task," said Alan Atkinson, CEO, WysDM Software. "The historical challenge has been finding a means to extract real-time attributes from all relevant resources: filers, networks, servers, applications, and clients to gain visibility and control over the NAS environment. The combination of WysDM and Acopia technologies offer customers the best of both worlds - the ability to seamlessly manage and optimize their file-based environment with a data protection management solution to identify performance bottlenecks or potential problems and take action before a fatal error occurs."
About Acopia Networks
Acopia Networks is the leader in high-performance, intelligent file virtualization. Solutions based on Acopia's FreedomFabric™ network operating system software 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, snapshots, and replication across multi-vendor storage environments, Acopia helps 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.
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© 2007 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