Oregon County Deploys the F5 ARX Solution

Clackamas County in Oregon has announced it is using the F5 ARX solution to address key business initiatives while conforming to a zero budget growth directive.

 

F5 ARX has enabled the county to implement an automated storage tiering strategy and has enabled the county to meet its anticipated storage requirements through 2010 without further capital investment.

 

Senior IT Administrator at Clackamas County, Christopher Fricke, said that the tiering strategy enabled them to immediately shrink capacity by 10 terabytes. The County also expects further reductions as they roll the solution across the entire organization.

 

Prior to implementation of the solution, Clackamas County had to face annual storage growth rates of nearly 100 percent. Driven by the rapid growth of unstructured data, the county was forced to continually purchase more capacity as servers quickly filled. This not only made data management increasingly complex but also negatively impacted the county’s disaster recovery and replication initiatives.

 

The county wanted to solve all their problems and decided on F5’s Data Manager file system inventory tool which provided a better understanding of its environment.

 

The county realized that approximately 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.

 

After this discovery, the county deployed F5’s ARX systems to place newer, business-critical data on tier 1. The solution ensured that the older, less critical information was moved to a less expensive tier 2. In addition, the archived data has been moved to a tier 3 deduplication platform. Once this data is moved, it is reduced to conserve even more space.

 

Fricke said that now at any given time, their tier 1 and tier 2 devices hold less than 10 percent of their data and the county is now free from chasing capacity demands and can use the saved money to make performance improvements.

 

F5 Networks (News - Alert) recently sponsored a new IDC white paper, “The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-based Storage” which indicates that companies can achieve dramatic cost savings and management efficiencies from storage tiering.

 

Findings from TechValidate, an independent research organization note that a large number of IT organizations reduced their overall annual storage budget by an average of 20 percent or more by deploying F5 ARX.

 

“The economic impact of file virtualization exhibited in real-world environments like Clackamas County and those reflected in the research conducted by IDC (News - Alert) 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.”