News

posted on 04 March 2008 15:02

BlueArc has topped out its high-end network-attached storage (NAS) range with the Titan 3000 product, replacing the current Titan 2000.

It doubles the price and performance of the previous range-topping Titan 2000 and, BlueArc claims, offers the industry's lowest price per IOP along with world-record performance.

The machine's software now has an openly available application programming interface (API) so that third-party application providers and customers can integrate their applications more closely to it and build intelligent file services applications.

BlueArc CEO Mike Gustafson said: "Storage has lagged behind as the rest of the IT infrastructure has evolved into a utility that users can tap as needed. The BlueArc Titan 3000 series marks a significant milestone for our customers and for the company's vision, and we're pleased to offer a unified storage solution so powerful and so cost-effective that it replaces our current generation of products."

The Titan 3000 is aimed at unrestrained file data growth in markets such as internet services, life sciences, entertainment, oil and gas exploration, design and simulation and electronic discovery.

BlueARc has continued to extend its field-programmable, gate array (FPGA) architecture and used it as the base for the Titan 3000. It offers a usable file system capacity of 256 terabytes, which it says is is 16 times that of the traditional market competition (NetApp I think) and four times the number of virtual servers.

There are two Titan 3000 models:
- Titan 3100: Maximum performance of approximately 100,000 SPECsfs IOPS, maximum throughput at 10 gigabits per second and maximum capacity at 2 petabytes (usable).
- Titan 3200: Maximum performance of approximately 200,000 SPECsfs IOPS (Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. System File Server Input/Output operations per second), maximum throughput at 20 gigabits per second and maximum capacity of 4 petabytes (usable).

The Titan 3000 offers its very high-performance without increasing prices over the out-going Titan 2000.

Customers may purchase or upgrade to the BlueArc Titan 3000 series immediately

In related announcements today, BlueArc said it would OEM Brocade's StorageX file virtualisation software, enabling it to consolidate and virtualise heterogeneous filers under the Titan 3000, and also resell HDS' Data Discovery Suite offering file search and migration services, which uses the API referred to above.