Surprise, surprise: F5 is doing something

A storage de-dupe and network acceleration box

By Chris Mellor at Blocks and Files • Get more from this author

Posted in Enterprise, 8th May 2008 18:35 GMT

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According to an IT man from Arizona, F5 is up to something, something good. We've been wondering what it has been doing now that it has acquired Acopia and its file virtualising ARX switch. Well, according to this Arizonan who is familiar with the situation, F5 is developing a single box to replace two that people would need now.

Let's say you have a de-duping storage array or some other very efficient, high utilisation array and you ned to transfer its contents regularly and reliably to a disaster recovery or business continuance site. You need a network acceleration box that knows about storage, a Riverbed Steelhead say, alongside your Data Domain de-duping array.

The F5 development is a box that stores data very effectively and also sends it in an accelerated fashion across a WAN link to a remote site. One plus one ...equals one and not two. You can see how the idea fits in with the overall idea of F5 about IT efficiency improvement.

Interestingly, Riverbed is also developing a storage box, a storage virtualisation something that speaks to data centre consolidation issues.

Perhaps Riverbed will end up with two boxes while F5 will produce one. Then again maybe the ARX box will co-exist with the coming box and F5 will have two too. Interesting times we live in.

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