BlueArc Revs New NAS Engines

Convinced that it can outsell Network Appliance and EMC with its scalable architecture, BlueArc introduced the Titan 2000 storage system family.

BlueArc officials said the Titan 2100 storage system and the Titan 2200 storage system run as many as 100,000 operations per second. These speeds are twice the performance of BlueArc's first Titan and three times higher than systems from NetApp or EMC.

To say that BlueArc machines play in the high end of the enterprise is an understatement.

The company's goal is to provide maximum performance, scalability and availability of data files from as few machines as possible in a large enterprise.

For example, BlueArc Vice President Steve Daheb said BlueArc once consolidated data files from 14 NetApp machines down to two Titans, and as many as 50 direct-attached storage (DAS) machines onto one Titan.

Fewer machines is a goal many corporations are trying to attain as they look to cut power and maintenance costs of the gear in their data centers, Daheb noted.

But these businesses don't want to sacrifice performance and the readiness to recall their data; Daheb said the company made sure the 2000 line was more potent than the first generation.

The Titan 2100 Storage System delivers 5 gigabits per second of throughput and scalability to 256 terabytes. The Titan 2200 Storage System delivers 10 gigabits of throughput and scalability to 512 terabytes for a single file system.

Both systems come standard with six Gigabit Ethernet ports and four four-gigabit Fibre channel ports to make sure that data is always available. The Titan 2100 and Titan 2200 systems also offer a 10-gigabit cluster interconnect port between Titans.

Moreover, customers needn't rip and replace their Titan 1000 chassis to enjoy the benefits of the 2000 systems. Existing Titans can be converted to a Titan 2100 or Titan 2200 by swapping the old blades with new 2000-oriented devices.

Titan 2000 storage systems are available now, starting at approximately $100,000.

To go along with the Titan 2000, the San Jose, Calif., company today launched Cluster Name Space (CNS) technology, which provides a directory tying information from storage pools and servers.

With CNS, multiple file systems on one or more Titan servers can be linked to provide users with a common root for both CIFS and NFS access. Clients of both types gain access to data through any node in the cluster.