Clackamas County in Oregon Implements F5 ARX Solution

F5 Networks, Inc., in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), announced that Clackamas County in Oregon has implemented the F5 ARX solution to meet key business initiatives while conforming with a zero budget growth directive. The county uses F5 ARX to implement an automated storage tiering strategy, which has reclaimed 85 percent of its high-performance disk capacity and will enable the county to meet its anticipated storage requirements through 2010 without further capital investment.

“We immediately shrank capacity by 10 terabytes with the tiering strategy, and I expect to see further reductions as we roll this out across the organization,” said Christopher Fricke, Senior IT Administrator at Clackamas County.

Led by the rapid growth of unstructured data, Clackamas County was burdened by annual storage growth rates of nearly 100 percent. This forced the county to continually purchase more capacity as servers quickly filled, making data management increasingly complex and negatively impacting the county’s disaster recovery and replication initiatives.

To solve the problem, the county first used F5’s Data Manager file system inventory tool to gain a better understanding of its environment. Analysis revealed that close to 90 percent of the data that was consuming its most expensive, high-performance storage platform (tier 1) had not been used in 120 days or more.

On the basis of this information, the county deployed F5’s ARX systems to place newer, business-critical data on tier 1, while older, less critical information is moved to less costly tier 2. Archived data is moved to a tier 3 deduplication platform, where it is reduced to conserve even more space. F5’s ARX devices ensure that this data movement does not require downtime and never impacts user access to data.

“At any given time, our tier 1 and tier 2 devices hold less than 10 percent of our data,” Fricke added. “Now, we don’t have to waste time chasing capacity demands and, when the budget frees up for infrastructure investment, we can focus on making performance improvements instead.”

New IDC Research Reports Dramatic Cost Savings
and Management Efficiencies from Storage Tiering
Clackamas County’s experiences mirror the results found in a new IDC white paper entitled The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-based Storage. Sponsored by F5 Networks, the IDC research included one-on-one interviews with senior IT executives at US and European companies.

IDC found that companies are increasing their file-based storage by 50 to 120 percent per year and that 2008 was the first year in which unstructured, file-based data drove a majority of new storage capacity in all organizations’ data centers.1 Even with current economic difficulties, growth in file-based information is expected to accelerate in the coming years according to the white paper. By 2012, more than 75 percent of new storage capacity shipped will be dedicated to the storage, organization, and protection of files.

The interviews also revealed that companies that implemented storage tiering using the capabilities of F5 ARX were able to reduce anticipated spending on disk capacity for file-based data by 50 to 80 percent, cut migration times by up to 90 percent, and shrink backup times and backup resources by up to 80 percent.

F5 ARX Customers
Report Strong Financial and Operational Savings
As additional third-party evidence of ARX’s positive economic impact, TechValidate, an independent research organization, recently analyzed financial and operational benefit data collected from existing ARX customers.

The results were impressive:

• 51% of IT organizations reduced their overall annual storage budget by an average of 20% or more by deploying F5 ARX. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 3F9-1DA-708)
• 51% of organizations using F5 ARX reported a payback period of 12 months or less. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: F47-715-302)
• 100% of IT organizations that deployed F5 ARX reduced their storage administration time by an average of 19%. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 97C-976-0E5)

“The economic impact of file virtualization exhibited in real-world environments like Clackamas County and those reflected in the research conducted by IDC and TechValidate are even more pertinent in the current economic climate,” said Nigel Burmeister, Director of Product Marketing at F5. “Now more than ever, IT departments need solutions that will help them support new growth in the face of cost-containment initiatives. F5 ARX has clearly demonstrated that ability.”

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