BlueArc Unveils Titan, Changes the Economics of Network Storage
Modular server allows customers to adapt as storage needs change, protecting investment and minimizing cost
San Jose, Calif. - Jan. 26, 2004 - BlueArc Corporation today announced the new Titan SiliconServer, the world's only modular network storage product that protects customers' storage investment and scales to meet the explosive growth in enterprise data. Titan allows a single file system to grow up to 256 terabytes and delivers throughput up to 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps) - providing the best performance and return on investment in the storage industry. BlueArc's unique SiliconServer Architecture allows customers to scale a single Titan far beyond any other product available today, adapting to changing application or capacity needs, simplifying management, accelerating productivity and protecting long-term investment.
"IT managers are looking to lower costs and ensure uninterrupted, high-speed access to critical data," said Brad Nisbet, senior research analyst with IDC. "Modular, hardware-based storage solutions like Titan from BlueArc provide customers with the investment protection and scalable performance they are seeking."
Traditionally, IT organizations add storage systems to scale and keep pace with the unrelenting growth of enterprise data. This leads to islands of storage that are expensive to maintain and difficult to manage. In addition, as network infrastructure and application server performances increase, storage administrators find that a "forklift upgrade" is required to scale their storage infrastructure due to the short lifecycles offered by traditional storage systems. This provides little investment protection to meet rapidly changing business requirements. As a result, IT departments face storage management nightmares and skyrocketing costs. Titan enables customers to scale performance, storage and user load via modular upgrades, without replacing the entire system. This simplifies management and eliminates the forklift upgrade mentality that has plagued storage buyers.
Titan seamlessly integrates into BlueArc's Silicon Information Network, a management framework that provides a single point of control for global storage assets. This unified data infrastructure simplifies management and allows administrators to instantly grow or partition data storage to meet changing business needs. Within the Silicon Information Network, remote office data can be consolidated into a central data pool using BlueArc's Remote Data Acceleration technology. Customers including Altera Corporation, Harvard University's Life Sciences Division and Rhythm & Hues are currently using Titan to increase performance and scalability, while simplifying and consolidating their storage.
"The key value of Titan is investment protection," says James Reaney, Life Sciences Division, Harvard University. "In Titan, BlueArc gave us a solution that we could scale in a modular fashion, as we needed it. With Titan, we don't have to purchase everything at once, but can scale one shelf at a time -- until we reach 250 terabytes."
In the Titan product, BlueArc once again delivers unparalleled performance and scalability that not only keeps pace with current networking infrastructures, but also scales to meet the networking speeds of the future. Titan immediately delivers 5 Gbps throughput and has the ability to scale to 20 Gbps with a single, inexpensive modular upgrade. This modularity not only allows performance upgrades, but also enables customers to scale user or application load capabilities with zero impact on system performance and keep pace with changing technology requirements.
Titan's hardware-based Silicon File System supports file systems up to 256 terabytes and utilizes Virtual Volumes to logically partition data for users, groups or departments across the enterprise -- allowing storage administrators to dynamically expand and contract storage allocations to meet changing business needs. This reduces storage management issues and eliminates the downtime associated with other storage systems during data migration and reallocation. Titan's Silicon File System reduces metadata search speed, delivers low latency and maintains performance levels as capacity increases, allowing customers' file sets to grow into the trillions and support up to 60,000 concurrent users.
Titan is built on BlueArc's unique SiliconServer Architecture, which moves typical software-based functions into programmable hardware, providing increased throughput and faster information access. Titan also incorporates BlueArc's Multi-Tiered Storage technology, which enables users to tailor their storage performance and cost to meet different application needs within a single system. In addition, BlueArc's Accelerated Data Copy technology allows non-intrusive backup and replication between tiers of storage, eliminating backup windows.
"We are focused on delivering storage in the way that makes sense for customers, rather than forcing them to buy storage in a way that benefits vendors," said Gianluca Rattazzi, president and CEO of BlueArc. "To us, requiring that companies buy an entirely new system and migrate all of their data every time they reach capacity or obsolescence is like asking them to hire and re-train an entirely new workforce just to add a single employee. By combining the scalability of SAN and the performance and simple management of NAS, Titan empowers customers to plan for the long term while letting them buy storage in a way that makes sense for their business today."
Titan is available immediately starting at $50,000. BlueArc provides enterprise-class service and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year. For more information, visit http://www.bluearc.com.
About BlueArc
BlueArc Corporation changes the economics of network storage by helping customers manage more information with less effort. BlueArc's SiliconServer storage systems enable organizations to maximize performance and reduce operating costs through the movement of software functions into programmable hardware. Since 1998, BlueArc has provided scalable and reliable products, services and solutions to help enterprises achieve unmatched productivity and profitability from their data. The company's headquarters are in San Jose, California with UK operations based in Bracknell, England. More information on BlueArc is available on the Internet at http://www.bluearc.com.