F5 Networks last week announced new file virtualization products and features designed to help enterprises more easily manage their data storage assets in an automated fashion.

For starters, F5 upgraded the operating system for its Acopia switches. Acopia’s ARX appliances can virtualize files stored on network-attached storage (NAS) devices and file servers, allowing IT administrators to define and automatically enforce data-management policies in the network. F5 gained the technology with its purchase of Acopia last fall.

New to the Acopia FreedomFabric Version 3.0 operating system is the ability to take heterogeneous virtual snapshots. With the new functionality, administrators can create snapshots, or replicas of data, across multiple, heterogeneous filers. Users and applications then can have direct access to these federated snapshots for uses such as backup, replication, and recovery of accidentally deleted or modified files or directories.

Snapshots are nothing new, but the ability to take virtual snapshots that span multiple heterogeneous filers is significant because it eliminates the need for administrators to manage separate filers and individual snapshots.

“A company might have many different file servers or NAS devices, each running their own snapshot technology, each running their own snapshot schedules,” says Nigel Burmeister, director of product management for F5’s data solutions business. “That is very complicated to manage, as an administrator, because you have all these different snapshots running on a per-file-system basis, and you might have 10, 20 or 100 file systems on one NAS device.”

What F5 Acopia is providing is a single point of contact. “Instead of managing these things on a per-storage basis, you can now manage them on a virtual or global basis,” Burmeister says. “We gather all the relevant snapshots together, we aggregate them into what we call a virtual snapshot, and then we present that to the users and applications.”

F5 also announced a new standalone software product, Acopia FreedomFabric Network Manager, that can run on a standard server and provide a foundation for managing policies across multiple distributed file virtualization systems.

It’s built on a modular architecture and the plan is to release different modules, or functions, over time, Burmeister says. The first module is targeted at simplifying installation of F5’s Acopia devices.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.