Quotes of Note

The benefits of intelligent file virtualization is generating tremendous excitement among users, analysts, and industry experts. Here are a few examples of what people are saying about file virtualization in general, and Acopia's innovative solutions in particular:

About the collaboration between Acopia and IBM:

"The potential impact of the relationship between IBM Global Services and Acopia is considerable.  For Acopia, the addition of its intelligent file storage virtualization systems into IBM Global Services' customer solution sets is an important validation point: and for IBM Global Services it provides yet another innovative offering proving that they are constantly adding new and important solutions for its customers, while their competitors are scratching their heads trying to figure out what it all means.  Customers benefit because they can implement a compelling solution while mitigating the risk by acquiring it from IBM Global Services."   
- Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)

"Enterprises today are dealing with an explosion in the amount of digital content created, used, and retained.  Deployment of a solution that allows companies to centrally organize, manage, and protect all of these files, as well as the storage assets that hold this information, is a critical requirement for today's data center executives.  With the addition of support for file virtualization products such as Acopia's ARX, IBM Global Services is in a strong position to help enterprises deploy reliable, scalable, and manageable solutions for organizing and storing companies' digital assets."
- Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems Research, IDC

“IBM's relationship with Acopia will benefit customers worldwide. As experts in data protection, we feel the combination of Acopia’s intelligent file virtualization technology with the IBM N series and Tivoli Storage Manager creates a powerful service delivery platform.  The ability to migrate and manage files without disruption across the enterprise using a single, integrated solution will be valuable to a wide range of industries."
- Bob Brennan, Iron Mountain President and Chief Operating Officer

"Being confirmed under this program [IBM System Storage Proven] greatly enhances the value and credibility of Acopia's ARX solution to the channel - and ultimately to the end user customer. Channel partners are now able to deliver these solutions knowing that interoperability issues have been addressed, thereby allowing for an even greater level of customer satisfaction."
- Janet Waxman, Vice President, Hardware Channels and Alliances, IDC

"As a longtime IBM partner, and winner of IBM's 2006 Beacon Award for Overall Technical Excellence, Lighthouse maintains the highest standards of technology and process.  We rely on IBM's Storage Proven designation when architecting storage management solutions. Acopia's achievement today further increases our enthusiasm in bringing the power of Acopia's intelligent file virtualization paired with IBM's N-Series arrays to our customers."
- Mike Adams, Storage Practice Leader, Lighthouse Computer Services. 

"Our customers are asking for a better alternative to manage rapidly growing file data.  The combination of Acopia's industry leading virtualization and automation technology with IBM's state of the art N-Series storage systems offers a compelling solution.  Today's Storage Proven™ announcement eliminates any 'FUD' in the marketplace surrounding interoperability and support, putting customers' minds at ease."
- Nigel Buttery, President of Dataline

About the benefits of using Acopia's solutions: 

"We were comfortable with Acopia's use of industry standard technology and support for both NFS and CIFS protocols.  During our lab tests, we found Acopia offered excellent manageability and ease of use.  Additionally, the ARX gives us the freedom to archive data to virtually any storage medium rather than being locked-in to a specific approach."
- Karloz Abad Santos, Senior Systems Administrator, WebEx

"Acopia's products allow us to consolidate our back-end storage resources while providing global data access to our users without disruption. Acopia enables us to use of best-in-class file systems, eliminating costly desktop re-configurations, and automatically migrating data without manual intervention or costly application disruption."
- Andy Brown, Chief Technology Architect, Merrill Lynch

"In addition to its key benefits of data tiering and load balancing, Acopia's flexible and easy to use replication policies provide the data protection and disaster recovery capabilities we required."
- Sean Maisey, Manager, IT Operations and Engineering, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

"Instead of purchasing expensive Tier 1 storage, we used the Acopia systems to easily and non-disruptively implement SATA storage that costs half as much. Moreover, we streamlined our backup policies, nearly eliminating our backup windows. Based upon these results, we anticipate that our Acopia investment will pay for itself in well under a year, and deliver compelling ROI for many years into the future."
- Reinhard Frumm, Team Manager IT-Technology, Messe Duesseldorf

"Immediately after deploying Acopia's switches, we experienced remarkable improvements in operational efficiencies. Acopia's in-band virtualization switches provided real-time balancing of load across our NAS infrastructure, greatly increasing storage scalability, while effectively utilizing all of our available file storage capacity. Since we implemented Acopia, we've cut the time spent manually managing the storage environment by 30%"
- Cliff Dutton, CTO, Ibis Consulting

"As a result of the Acopia implementation, we have increased our business workflow by over 560% and reduced our overhead associated with storage management by 20%. As a result of these significant performance gains, the Studio Services team is now able to focus their attention on business process efficiencies which will ultimately lead to more of our music being available for sale and hence more revenues"
- Mike Streb, VP of Global Infrastructure, Warner Music Group

"We are managing resources supporting multiple business groups on a 24 x 7 basis. Application downtime is business downtime, which is not an option for us. Acopia's virtualization products allowed us to perform a multi-terabyte data migration, on-line, without disrupting our users' access to data, in a fraction of the time and cost to do it manually."
- Leon Roberge, Director of Information Systems, Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc.

"Acopia's automated data lifecycle management polices have allowed us to reduce our back-up times from 2.5 days to less than 2 hours, an overall reduction of over 90%. In addition, since we implemented the Acopia products four months ago, our IT staff has been able to reduce the time we spend manually managing our storage environment by 40%. This represents a significant cost savings for us."
- Yury Gutgarts, CIO of Archive Systems

"As a worldwide organization with a 24 x 7 business requirement, we must maintain access to data at all times, including during periods of infrastructure change. We chose Acopia's ARX products because of their ability to transparently migrate data, which has greatly reduced the pain and disruption of migrating to new platforms. Acopia's products have allowed us to automatically move our older design projects to more cost effective storage, without effecting user access to the data during and after the archival process. We expect that the savings we experience on disk and tape costs alone will more than pay for our investment in the Acopia switches."
- Iain Godwin, ICT Director and Senior Partner, at Foster and Partners

"The migration to Acopia was seamless and fast. Acopia's switches reduced the size of the data set we actively manage, creating operational efficiencies. We estimate that Acopia has reduced our total backup and replication time by more than 70 percent. By deploying Acopia's ARX solutions, we have optimized our storage network investments, greatly simplified our storage management practices, and significantly lowered our overall storage costs."
- Bonnie Stiewing, Senior Systems Administrator, United Rentals

About Acopia's current technology and File Area Networking (FAN) vision:

"Acopia and that company’s ARX platform are excellent examples of how a FAN can be built around an intelligent file virtualization platform. We see Acopia’s advantages in scalability, performance, and converged functionality as keys to its success in this emerging FAN market. For IT decision makers who are serious about deploying a file management strategy that will scale and adapt across their entire enterprise for years to come, they need to evaluate Acopia ARX. We are quite confident that the FANs of the future will be using this technology aggressively."
- Brad O'Neill, Senior Analyst, The Taneja Group

Files are very different than blocks. They have a business context. In other words, the metadata can be used to apply policies to the file - for instance how long to keep data, where to store it, when to shred it, etc... - this view of metadata can only be accomplished with an approach that is file-aware, such as a FAN, which can provide great value to customers. I look forward to following this marketplace as it evolves."
- Dave Russell, Research Vice President, Gartner

"The ability to do snapshots across the proprietary boundaries created by many enterprise storage vendors is an important step toward the deconstruction of monolithic storage arrays. Heterogeneous snapshot holds out the possibility of driving down the cost of array products by eliminating a consumer lock-in too often soft-peddled as a 'value-add' feature - one for which vendors charge a premium whether their customers use the feature or not.  We ought to be able to fit storage features and functions to our needs, and not be forced to fit our requirements to the proprietary architecture of vended products.  Heterogeneous snapshots are a step in the right direction and Acopia Networks offers this capability today."
- Jon Toigo, Managing Partner, Toigo Partners International

"Conventional thinking had held that storage performance problems are best tackled with costly "Tier 1" disk storage. But what customers really need is simple access with ample throughput, and that is what Acopia is delivering today with 'Tier 0'."
- Dan Tanner, ProgresSmart founder, industry analyst

"We have a complexity crisis in unstructured data that necessitates a paradigm shift. Without any changes, new application approaches such as SOA and dynamic web content, when coupled with unrelenting growth rates, will break traditional file-based architectures within the next 3 years. Acopia's approach to file virtualization is an excellent example of how the new FAN-centric paradigm will resolve these issues: Leverage the network, thinking globally about file controls, and provide optimal scale and flexibility. This is where the market is heading and Acopia is driving this trend."
- Brad O'Neill, Senior Analyst, The Taneja Group

"With the Acopia ARX, we are seeing incredible improvements in response times and the ability to manage active, semi-active, and inactive data in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Most vendors talk about ILM as a way to save us money, and we definitely see that benefit with Acopia; however only Acopia has had the foresight to offer automated tiering to dramatically improve our performance as well. The ability to apply full compute power to solve complex challenges means faster time to results and ultimately, greater customer satisfaction. In fact, we believe Foster and Partners' effective utilization of advanced technology, such as Acopia's ARX, is a key competitive advantage."
- Mark Read, Infrastructure Manager, Associate, Foster and Partners, an Acopia customer

"Our customers have been telling us for some time that one of their greatest challenges center around their ability, or rather lack thereof, to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver a fully managed, automated, storage service and cope with the exponential growth of their file-based information - particularly frustrating have been the problems they face in regards to file storage bottlenecks. The availability of intelligent file virtualization technology from Acopia, as a core component of our Infrastructure solution set, will allow our customers to address these storage challenges head-on. By allowing our customers to match their business requirements with each storage tier's cost and capabilities, as a service, they will be able to deliver improved datacenter efficiencies, while dramatically reducing storage and backup costs."
- Neil Parker, CEO, FIFTHWAVE Solutions.

"Tiered storage and file virtualization are rapidly becoming strategic focus points for our customers - we see great potential for these solutions on the Central European market. Acopia's innovative ARX products fit ideally into our portfolio and enable us to deliver high quality integrated solutions. Additionally, Acopia's outstanding technical performance and innovative features offer our customers a superb ROI."
- Dirk Müller-Niessner, Managing Director, tcc Products GmbH