F5 Networks Wants to Simplify NAS for SMBs

F5 Networks, Inc. announced new hardware platforms for 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."
 
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 file virtualization capabilities, organizations can access and 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.
 
F5’s new ARX platforms enable SMBs 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 performance storage resources for their important or 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 benefit of reducing backup windows. 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 increased scale and performance capabilities with the ARX1500. For medium-sized storage environments, the ARX2500 platform includes support for 10GbE network infrastructures.

"Data growth in healthcare is explosive, and we realized some time ago the need to approach data storage differently," said Wayne Keatts, Manager, Enterprise Security and Architecture at Methodist Health System in Dallas, Texas. "We chose ARX and now fully understand the data management benefits that ARX provides, from non-disruptive data migration to reduced storage costs and significantly shortened backup windows. With the new ARX2500 platform, F5 has provided an outstanding way for Methodist Health System to manage our rapid data growth for years to come with a highly scalable and cost-effective data management platform."
 
"Our team has been using ARX for over two years now, and the value it can add for an organization’s storage infrastructure is immense," said Michael Raposa, Sr. Director, Infrastructure at iN DEMAND LLC. "By adding to its product suite with the new platforms, F5 now has a more complete set of offerings to help companies efficiently scale their storage systems alongside an organization’s overall growth. Judging from our experience, we’re pleased to see F5’s continued innovation and are confident that ARX will continue to support our needs looking forward."
 
"The new ARX platforms address a real need in the storage market," said David Hekimian, CTO at Trace3. "Previously, ARX products have been a more obvious fit for large enterprises, given the scale and performance capabilities of the solution. By offering F5’s substantial data management and file virtualization capabilities to a wider range of customers at an accessible price point, we expect to see a marked interest among smaller, growing organizations."
 
"The combination of scale, performance, and price in the new hardware platforms will enable an expanded class of enterprises to leverage the data management benefits of file virtualization," said Chuck Wood, Director of Product Management at F5. "ARX continues to be the industry’s only solution that provides true data mobility and automated data management policies for heterogeneous storage environments, and we’re excited to bring these new products to market."
 
The ARX1500 and ARX2500 hardware platforms are available.