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What is ACER ASC Express ?
ACER
ASC EXPRESS BASICS
The explosion of data in today’s networked computing environments stresses
the abilities of many Information Technology groups while the demand to
store and access data doubles each year.
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.
Documents, databases, web pages, and other sorts of media each have their
own rules for accessibility, retention and backup. Estimates of the cost to
manage storage range from 5 to 10 times the actual cost of the storage
hardware itself.
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
ASC (Acer Storage Centre) 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 through a software-only solution that runs
on top of the ALTOS NAS 700 Appliance.
ASC is a software suite that virtualizes the ‘disk’ hardware into a storage pool,
no matter if they are SCSI, Fibre Channel or iSCSI. ASC provides companies with
immediate total freedom of choice in connectivity and storage hardware
platform.
You can add physical or logical drives or even entire enclosures in this storage
pool. Then ASC allocates storage capacity from this pool by creating arbitrary
virtual drives. These ‘virtual drives’ appear exactly like a real SCSI drive, each
having their own SCSI ID or world-wide-name. The size can be anything you
want and the actual storage space can span across different physical disks. For
example you can create a 100GB virtual drive, with 50GB from an ACER S300
SCSI enclosure, another 25GB from an ACER S205F Fibre Channel enclosure and
the rest from an X SCSI enclosure.
With this sophisticated storage farm, the provision of the storage back to our
servers is done through SAN/IP protocol or iSCSI/IP target mode.
Target Mode is used when a SCSI initiator requests operations to be performed
by a HBA target device.
At the same time, we also offer CIFS and NFS protocols.
This is how ASC achieves both Block (SAN) level and File (NAS) level connectivity
all under a single infrastructure.
Acer Altos® NAS 700 Solution Guide
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