ASBIS Has Developed First Standard Designs for Virtualized Data Storage

ASBIS has rolled out ASBIS Virtualized Storage (AVS), the data storage expenses cutting solution. Data storage resources virtualization (virtualization) is a new data management technique, which substantially reduces the data storage costs by up to 30%. Major companies data storage costs often amount up to 1/3 of the whole IT budget.

In general, virtualization is a way to use and manage existing storage resources more efficiently. It helps to reduce the following regular expenses:
• New disk purchases
• Overhead costs (each administrator can control more data storage)
• Legacy equipment investment saving – SCSI, Fibre Channel and even IDE data storage units can be used with most modern Fibre Channel SAN data management techniques, such as snapshots and asynchronous replication.

Virtualization provides a higher-level approach to the data storage management. With virtualization, an administrator can control storage capacity, thinking in terms of Terabytes, not disks or disk subsystems. To simplify management, technical details such as array interface, manufacturer-specific data, and physical capacity are being hidden.

Data storage devices are combined to the single pool, and virtual volumes are created from the fragments (chunks) of storage space, whether they're physically located on SCSI, Fibre Channel or IDE devices.

As a result, free space stripes typically wasted in non-virtualized data storage environments are returned to the business use. Administrator now can take free space away from the servers trashing it, and allocate it to the more demanding hosts, without buying any new storage systems.

ASBIS Virtualized Storage
ASBIS Virtualized Storage (AVS) is a solution that allows companies to reduce costs of storing and managing large amounts of data. Two AVS models are offered, AVS Basic and AVS Fault-Tolerant, with initial capacity of 500GB and 1TB respectively. AVS Basic and Fault Tolerant can also be used in the tailor-made configurations created by ASBIS partners to serve clients' needs perfectly.

Solutions are being sold to dealers as a bundle of components from Datacore, IBM, Eurologic, Vixel and Qlogic, system design documentation along with software tuning tips, developed by ASBIS engineers. Additional technical support is provided.

Prices and Availability
AVS Basic and AVS Fault Tolerant are commercially available through ASBIS partners in Russia, former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa. The recommended retail prices are $51 800 for AVS Basic and $225 200 for AVS Fault Tolerant.