SCIENCE

F5 Networks announced new hardware platforms for F5 ARX file virtualization solutions. With the introduction of the ARX1500 and ARX2500 appliances, the ARX product line continues to offer compelling performance capabilities for enterprise organizations. Specifically, the new platforms provide small and mid-sized enterprises with advanced data management capabilities at attractive price points, along with superior scalability and performance levels.

"In today's rapidly digitizing economy, small and mid-sized enterprises are dealing with exploding amounts of digital content and a growing range of data management challenges," said Richard Villars, VP of Storage and IT Executive Strategies at IDC. "Solutions like F5's new ARX products take advantage of advanced file virtualization to help IT teams boost the performance and reduce the administrative burden of their file-based storage assets."

Details

F5 ARX solutions enable organizations to simplify and scale their data management infrastructures by eliminating the static mapping between client and storage resources. With F5's unique file virtualization capabilities, organizations can access and seamlessly migrate data between resources as demand dictates, and without impacting users or requiring downtime. In addition, ARX's automated storage tiering and global namespace functions help enterprises develop a strategy that fits their storage growth requirements at the lowest possible costs.

F5's new ARX platforms enable small and mid-sized enterprises to:

-- Defer Costly Storage Purchases and Reduce Backup Windows

Traditionally, organizations have followed a model of adding more storage equipment as data management needs outgrew capacity. However, many organizations found that expensive, high performance storage devices would be required to expand their existing infrastructure models, due in part to the difficulty in identifying and separating high and low priority data files. With ARX's storage tiering capabilities, organizations can designate high performance storage resources for their most important or most frequently accessed data. ARX's ability to manage data across different devices in a unified storage environment enables organizations to utilize less expensive devices for general storage, maximizing the efficiency of existing systems and alleviating the need to purchase new devices as frequently. In addition, intelligently tiering important versus low priority data files delivers the ancillary benefit of reducing backup windows considerably. High priority data can be backed up daily while secondary and tertiary data can be done less frequently.

-- Automate Time Consuming Data Management Tasks

In addition to providing storage tiering capabilities, ARX devices also enable IT administrators to automate labor-intensive processes for common data management tasks, including scaling storage infrastructures or performing data migrations. In addition, IT teams can implement a policy-based approach to data management, meaning that standard tasks can be configured, automated, and tailored in accordance with individual organizations' storage needs.

-- Deploy Powerful, Scalable Solutions to Support Growth

By enhancing the ARX series, F5 is strengthening the product line's value proposition, accommodating organizations' requirements today and supporting their data management needs as they grow. Small enterprises enjoy dramatically increased scale and performance capabilities with the ARX1500. For medium-sized storage environments, the ARX2500 platform includes support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructures.