F5 Acopia and IBM Solutions Note

F5 Acopia Intelligent File Virtualization and IBM Network Attached Storage

IBM network attached storage (NAS) enables companies to address their storage issues by providing cost-effective data storage solutions that fit each organization’s needs. These solutions enhance protection for critical business data and increase asset utilization, availability, and reliability levels with low management cost.

F5 Acopia intelligent file virtualization solutions enable organizations to seamlessly migrate to IBM NAS. They also help to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of managing multi-vendor, multi-platform NAS and file server environments. Acopia intelligent file virtualization solutions are used in conjunction with IBM NAS to provide significant benefits to enterprises.

Seamless File Server to NAS ConsolidationNAS solves many of the problems associated with administering and maintaining individual file servers by improving overall ease of use, scalability, reliability, availability, and performance. However, the migration from a file server environment to a NAS environment can be daunting, requiring significant maintenance windows and possible business disruption, as well as a great deal of manual configuration of client systems and applications.

Acopia intelligent file virtualization solutions eliminate these issues, allowing companies to migrate data from legacy file servers to IBM NAS without requiring downtime and without requiring client or application reconfiguration. Embedded data migration policies enable customers to consolidate file data onto IBM NAS storage without disrupting business processes or client access. The F5 Acopia solutions automate the data migration process and allow continuous access to the data during the migration.

Transparent NAS to NAS MigrationF5 Acopia intelligent file virtualization solutions can be used to transparently migrate data from existing NAS systems (e.g. EMC) to IBM NAS, without incurring downtime and without requiring administrators to manually re-configure client systems and applications. Data migrations that were disruptive and time consuming can now take place automatically and online - without disrupting the business. F5 Acopia products provide a transparent migration path to IBM and significantly reduce the customer pain associated with such transitions.

Automated Storage Tiering / Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)F5 Acopia automated storage tiering policies allow enterprises to seamlessly integrate IBM storage products into their tiered storage architecture. By providing a Global Namespace across multiple storage devices in conjunction with tiered storage policies to automate data lifecycle management, F5 Acopia provides a transparent way for organizations to integrate IBM storage platforms into their environment without significant overhead or application disruption. These tiered storage solutions can help companies realize significant capital expenditure savings by automatically moving non-critical business data off of expensive

Highlights

• Simplify access to file data across multiple physical storage systems

• Create a tiered storage environment to match the cost of storage to the value of data

• Eliminate downtime related to data migrations, software upgrades and changes to the physical storage without affecting users or applications

• Improve storage resource utilization

• Optimize application performance by dynamically balancing capacity and workload

F5 Networks, Inc.

41 Wellman StreetLowell, MA 01851(978) 513-2900 Voice(978) 513-2990 Faxwww.f5.cominfo@f5.com

F5 NetworksAsia-Pacific

+65-6533-6103 Voice+65-6533-6106 Faxinfo.asia@f5.com

© 2007 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, F5 Networks, the F5 logo, Acopia, FreedomFabric and ARX are trademarks or registered trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries.

F5 Networks Ltd.Europe/Middle-East/Africa

+44 (0) 1932 582 000 Voice+44 (0) 1932 582 001 Faxemeainfo@f5.com

F5 NetworksJapan K.K.

+81-3-5114-3200 Voice+81-3-5114-3201 Faxinfo@f5networks.co.jp

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storage resources to lower cost storage alternatives. This helps reduce backup and recovery windows and backup infrastructure costs by reducing the amount of redundant data backed up on a regular basis.

Scale Application Performance and Eliminate NAS “Hotspots”The F5 Acopia dynamic load balancing policies provide powerful realtime load balancing capabilities that can enable IT managers to eliminate “hot spots” and to automatically balance capacity utilization in their file storage infrastructure. With F5 Acopia, storage administrators have the flexibility to configure load balancing policies that dynamically distribute application load and / or dynamically balance capacity across multiple IBM NAS devices in real-time, transparently to applications and users, thereby increasing aggregate disk capacity, throughput and CPU performance.

Combined Acopia / IBM solutions provide the following unique advantages:

Automated Tiering / ILM: Together F5 Acopia and IBM provide the only non-disruptive file tiering solution based on industry standard NFS and CIFS. The F5 Acopia / IBM solution provides superior scale, performance and availability characteristics to alternate approaches.

Online Data Migration: The F5 Acopia / IBM solution provides the industry’s only multi-protocol, multi-platform online data migration capability at enterprise scale and performance.

Dynamic Load Balancing: F5 Acopia virtualization devices used in con- junction with IBM NAS devices provide increased application perfor-mance and business throughput by dynamically distributing load.

Global Namespace: F5 Acopia and IBM provide organizations with a heterogeneous namespace that scales across NAS devices and does not require the deployment of software agents.

P R E S E N T A T I O N

A U T O M A T I O N

Data Migration Move data across heterogeneous storage non-disruptively

Storage Tiering Place data on the appropriate storage tier automatically

Data Replication Replicate data more efficiently and cost-effectively

Load Balancing Balance demand across existing devices dynamically

Simple, logical access to physical file systems

Applications and Users

Unified Storage Pool

Intelligent File Virtualization

ARX®

Acopia intelligent file virtualization solutions provide simple, logical access to NAS storage, and a policy layer, which automates many management tasks such as migration, tiering, replication, and load balancing, making them transparent to users and applications.