Raymar's f5 ® Storage Solution

Storage Solutions

Simplify data management and reduce costs with intelligent file virtualization

Today's IT infrastructures are complex and inflexible—and most of them just keep growing. Storage expenditures keep rising, resources are consumed by labor-intensive tasks, and management costs are spiraling higher. You can simplify data management and get costs under control with f5® intelligent file virtualization, which can reduce infrastructure complexity and boost operational efficiency.

Capacity Balancing Solutions

Get peak performance by eliminating hotspots and balancing utilization

Capacity balancing consolidates your existing storage resources into a "virtual file server." This approach can reduce the complexity and disruptiveness of managing multiple islands of disparate storage resources, helping you eliminate bottlenecks and increase overall utilization.

f5® intelligent file virtualization solution automate capacity balancing across multiple file systems and physical storage devices. Flexible capacity balancing policies allow you to dynamically distribute application load and capacity—transparently to both applications and users.

Business benefits of using f5® for capacity balancing include:

• Better utilization of existing storage resources. Storage utilization rates often hover at just 30 to 40%, and sharing excess capacity across systems can significantly boost overall utilization—maximizing your storage investment and postponing or even eliminating the need to purchase additional capacity.

• Improved business workflow. Aggregating storage capacity, throughput, and processing power can help optimize application performance and eliminate disruptions that impact user productivity.

• The ability to exceed the limitations of today's NAS devices. Pooling multiple file systems can create a large application workspace.

• No downtime or reconfiguration. Provisioning new storage into the virtual pool is a simple, non-disruptive task.

• Greater efficiency. Automating load balancing frees up IT resources to focus on other business-critical initiatives.

Data Migration Solutions

Move files between devices—without downtime and without affecting users

You might need to perform data migration—the process of moving data between storage devices—for any number of reasons, including file server or Network Attached Storage (NAS) consolidations, lease rollovers, platform upgrades, and vendor transitions. These migrations are often costly, time-consuming, and disruptive, and they almost always require service outages and manual reconfiguration of client systems and applications.

f5®'s intelligent file virtualization solution enables file-based data migration without down-time and without complex reconfiguration. Data migrations can take place automatically, online, and without disrupting your business.

Business benefits of using f5® for file-based data migration include:

• No client reconfiguration required. This can reduce migration times by as much as 90%, speeding upgrades, consolidations, and storage platform changes.

• No impact on user access. Powerful policies can automate the movement of entire file systems or just individual files between heterogeneous storage devices for both NFS and CIFS-oriented data.

• Reduced operational overhead. A result of streamlining migration with automated data movement.

• No need for stubs, pointers, or log files for data movement. These can reduce availability and add complexity to the backup and restore window.

Storage Tiering Solutions

Free up expensive disk space and reduce storage and backup costs

Storage tiering is the process of moving data to different types of storage based on the value of the data. In response to rapid data growth and rising storage management costs, many enterprises are using storage tiering to drive down costs, simplify storage administration, and better utilize resources.

f5®'s storage tiering solutions can help you automatically move non-critical data from expensive storage resources to lower cost alternatives, creating significant savings in capital expenditures. f5® devices also lower backup costs and shrink backup and recovery windows by reducing the amount of redundant data backed up on a regular basis.

Business benefits of using f5® for storage tiering include:

• Lower spending on disk capacity by 50 to 80%. Storage tiering lets you augment high-end storage with cost-effective alternatives like serial ATA.

• Reduced backup infrastructure costs and achieve 50 to 80% faster backup times. Moving non-critical data to a secondary tier reduces the amount of unchanged data that is backed up regularly.

• Better use of your most expensive storage tier. By matching the business value of data to the cost of storage, you can get more out of your high-end storage and reduce costs by adding more lower-end storage.

• More flexibility to deal with massive storage growth. You can free up IT resources by automating data movement based on file age, access dates, type, or other categories.