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Introduction

Since information, and the storage infrastructure that holds it, are critical to a company's success, the management of the storage becomes a serious issue, where reliability, availability and improved disaster recovery are all key factors.

The Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated network devoted to data storage and is a solution that meets the storage requirements of many businesses today. SANs address many of the reliability and availability issues for data storage. Essentially, SANs apply networking methodologies to the problems of storage, expanding the management possibilities for storage.

What is ASC?

ASC is the award-winning storage networking infrastructure software suite that simplifies storage management by delivering SAN and NAS and enterprise class storage services under a unified management umbrella across Fibre Channel and IP.

Developed by a team of world-class network and storage management experts, ASC provides vital storage services-virtualization, replication, mirroring, capacity-on-demand, TimeMark/TimeView, active-active failover, database-aware snapshot agents, zero-impact backup/restore enabler, DynaPath, storage service enabler, and more--through a software-only solution that runs on existing industry standard hardware. And by integrating today's most popular high-volume data transport protocols (Fibre Channel and SCSI) as well as newly emerging standards, like iSCSI/IP and InfiniBand, ASC provides companies with immediate total freedom of choice in connectivity and storage hardware platform, plus a future-proof architecture to stay on top of their ever-evolving data storage requirements.

With an unprecedented combination of manageability, performance, security, and flexibility, ASC transcends the limitations that have historically confined SANs to local data centers, enabling companies to utilize storage more efficiently, execute backup more quickly, expand capacity more smoothly, and significantly reduce total storage management costs.

What makes ASC special?

ASC offers enterprises an easy way to purchase, implement, and support new or existing enterprise SANs, while containing the costs associated with the ownership and management of storage solutions. Building an ASC storage network puts enterprise class storage services at your fingertips, allowing you to do more with less.

Provides total freedom in host/storage connectivity: Fibre Channel, IP/iSCSI, SCSI, JBOD, RAID, Solid state (RAM) disk, tape/library. Because ASC scales easily and encompasses all protocols and standards (current and upcoming), it is not just a tool, but an entire future-proof system.

Reduces management costs by leveraging existing IT infrastructures and know-how.

Cuts capital investment by consolidating storage resources for maximized utilization and efficiency.

Dramatically lowers storage administration overhead through centralized, simplified storage management.

Eliminates requirement for multiple software licenses and individual management of storage software for each server.

Maximizes performance for high bandwidth applications.

Provides total storage security with key-based authentication.

These benefits are all integrated into the ASC Server, an intelligent storage processor capable of supporting high performance storage I/O in a complex data management environment. The ASC solution delivers cost-effective, easy-to-use, flexible, rapidly deployable solutions for storing, managing, and migrating data.

ASC also enables service provider businesses, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs,) Application Service Providers (ASPs,) and Storage Service Providers (SSPs), to grow and manage their storage resources more easily.

ASC components

The primary components of the ASC Storage Network are the ASC Server, ASC SAN Clients, ASC NAS Clients, and the ASC Console. These components all sit on the same network segment, the storage network.

Server - The ASC Server is a dedicated network storage server. The job of the ASC Server is to communicate data requests between the clients and the logical (SAN and NAS) resources (logically mapped storage devices on the storage network) via Fibre Channel or IP.

SAN Clients - ASC SAN Clients are the actual file and application servers. There are two types of SAN Clients, SAN/IP and Fibre Channel. You can have both on your storage network.

NAS Clients - NAS Clients are the Windows/Unix users and groups that access data and storage (if authorized) on the storage network via standard operating system network mapping protocols.

Console - The ASC Console is the administration tool for the ASC storage network. It is a Java application that can be used on a variety of platforms and allows ASC administrators to create, configure, manage, and monitor the storage resources and services on the ASC storage network.

Acer, Inc.
www.acer.com