News

posted on 18 March 2008 16:40

Storage block and file networking vendor Brocade has introduced a File Management Engine (FME) appliance which virtualises the location of files in Windows environments and enables their transparent movement.

The background is that businesses are finding that file migrations are becoming both increasingly difficult since file access is becoming a 24X7 matter, and increasingly necessary since filer performance and utilisation are both declining, necessitating better, more appropriate file placement. Rampant file growth overwhelms IT departments, who face intricate, lengthy and out-of-hours work to move masses of files from one array to another.

Brocade's FME is an in-band appliance that works with Microsoft's Active Directory and DFS (Distributed File System) and is assigned effective ownership of shares. All SMB or CIFS access to files in those shares pass through it, and it connects user/application requests with physical file locations.

If a file needs to be moved then FME accomplishes that by, first, moving the file and, secondly, leaving an FME Link file (not a stub) in its place, which is metadata that points user access requests to the new location. The great advantage of this approach, versus holding such metadata inside the appliance's own storage, is that if the appliance goes down a replacement appliance can immediately function at full speed without having to rebuild a complicated metadata table and indices.

The FME Link files are protected by the protection regime applying to the filestore in which they reside. The FME can be assigned policies to scan file metadata, such as time since last access, and move files to more appropriate tiers of storage if policy criteria are met.

Because FME works with DFS it can be switched into and out of band as file migrations require. This also makes it easy to install and setup.

FME complements StorageX, which virtualises file directory structures, by virtualising file locations. As such it is an essential new component of Brocade's File Area Network (FAN) product set.

The hardware is a 2U X86 appliance with dual quadcore processors running Windows Storage Server and which can be clustered. Access is through ten 1Gbit Ethernet ports.

This hardware seems to be more than enough for the job and one wonders if it is going to be a foundation for doing more.

Richard Villars, Storage Systems Research VP at IDC, said: “Solutions like Brocade FME allow organisations to centralise file management and automate manual, time-consuming processes, leading to better information access, greater operational flexibility, and improved IT management efficiency.”

Brocade FME will be available from Brocade and the Company’s value-added resellers in April, and is supported by a broad portfolio of Brocade professional and support services. For additional information about Brocade FME, visit the Brocade Web site at www.brocade.com/FME.  Also a Taneja Group technology validation paper can be downloaded.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}