New virtual ARX appliance
F5 this week enhanced its ARX portfolio with the addition of the ARX Cloud Extender, the ARX Virtual Edition and the F5 iControl management API.
ARX Cloud Extender supports multiple cloud storage providers and object-based storage platforms. The ARX Virtual Edition (VE) allows F5’s technology to be enabled as a virtual instead of physical machine and the F5 iControl provides and open storage management API. All these enhancements let customers extend their file storage infrastructures into the cloud.
The ARX storage tiering support for the cloud presents files stored in the cloud as if they were residing in a local data center. User-settable policies govern which data is store in the cloud and control migration of files into Amazon S3, Iron Mountain VFS cloud or NetApp StorageGrid.
The ARX VE allows smaller organizations and remote branch offices to deploy ARX as a virtual machine. It is available in a free trial version, a full version and as an OEM version.
The Open File Services API, iControl, lets software developers integrate file virtualization with their own data management software. The API supports .Net, Java and Python.
Sean Maisey, manager of IT operations and engineering at Colonial Williamsburg is using the Cloud Extender for deep archive and disaster recovery.
The iControl file services API is available now. The Cloud Extender is expected to be available this quarter and the ARX Virtual Edition is expected to be available in the first quarter of next year.
