F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that the SEGA Corporation has deployed the F5® ARX® solution to simplify their file management and archiving systems.

In recent years, SEGA faced growing data management challenges with the increase of high-quality videos and multimedia files adding a significant burden to the file servers used by the company’s nearly 4,000 employees. As a result, weekly backup operations took 40 hours to complete. SEGA began looking for ways to simplify the operation of its file servers and make its data management efforts more efficient.

SEGA leveraged ARX’s file virtualization solution to implement an automated storage tiering strategy. Storage tiering allows SEGA to flexibly allocate storage resources, archiving non-critical data on lower-cost, large capacity devices and freeing up primary storage systems for its frequently used data. This approach helped the company decrease the number of expensive primary storage systems required, and substantially reduced the time required for backup operations. By enabling SEGA to maximize the efficiency of its existing storage hardware, the company was also able to pool available storage resources from servers that had previously operated independently.

F5’s ARX solution enables SEGA to:

Reduce the Cost of Data Management and Backup

• SEGA can now use lower-cost SATA disks for file archiving efforts, reducing overall storage costs by two-thirds and decreasing the number of files subject to daily backup operations. With a storage tiering strategy, SEGA has reduced the time spent on backup efforts by 40 percent.

Easily Manage Data without Impacting Users

• The client environment comprises different operating systems such as Linux, Macintosh, and Windows Vista, but when introduced on a company-wide basis, ARX enables seamless data migration to new servers.
• Due to ARX’s global namespace capability, employees can continue accessing data in the manner they are used to, even when new servers are installed.

Conveniently Scale their Infrastructure

• With ARX, heterogeneous storage systems are virtualized for maximum efficiency. With a virtual storage environment, additional capacity can be added to the existing pool of resources to support the company’s growth initiatives.

For more information about F5’s ARX file virtualization solutions, please visit www.f5.com/products/arx-series/.