Acopia Networks, the leader in high-performance, intelligent file virtualization, today announced that it will showcase new configurations that utilize tiered storage to dramatically increase application performance. The company will present a preview of these capabilities in Booth #409 during this week’s Storage Decisions, Fall 2006, taking place September 27 – 29, 2006 at the New York Hilton.

Traditional tiered storage, or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), approaches seek to move lower priority files to lower performing, less expensive disk in an effort to save on storage and backup costs. Acopia leads the industry in providing real-time automation of tiered storage for this purpose. However, Acopia is now expanding that traditional cost-saving approach to include tiering of data for the specific purpose of optimizing performance as well. At Storage Decisions, Acopia will highlight the results of exciting new research that underscores its ability to move specific data sets to higher performance, memory-based platforms, resulting in dramatic improvement in application performance.

In Acopia laboratory tests, when a specific application file set was moved to a high-performance storage device, application throughput increased by almost 30 times compared to similar tests run with the same file set residing on a popular modern NAS system. Amazingly, this high performance storage device consisted solely of a single, popular off-the-shelf server configured with 32GB memory and dual Intel® processors. The cost of this configuration was under $10,000. Given the cost difference between the popular NAS system and performance storage device this solution was 300x more cost effective than the popular NAS system alone when serving this workload.

“Time and again, in real-world customer environments, we have proven the value of automatically tiering data to less expensive systems – freeing up expensive disk resources and dramatically reducing storage and backup costs,” said Kirby Wadsworth, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Acopia. “Now, we are again leading the market by offering the ability to move critical data sets to a very high performance, memory-based performance storage device. Furthermore, because new industry standard servers now support massive memory configurations, we are accomplishing this with commodity hardware. For the right applications, the resulting price/performance improvements are off the chart.”

In addition to discussing these test results, Acopia will be demonstrating the value of intelligent file virtualization, and its ability to simplify file storage management – making it easier than ever for companies to migrate, tier, balance, and replicate file data across the entire enterprise storage environment.

Specifically, Acopia Booth #409, will also show how intelligent file virtualization provides the ability to:

• Migrate large numbers of files, transparently to users, without scheduled outages,
• Tier data to appropriate storage media automatically and continuously – freeing expensive high-performance disk and dramatically reducing storage and backup costs
• Increase utilization and optimize performance with advanced real-time load balancing
• Replicate data efficiently and flexibly to ensure data protection and high availability