Backup Technology Deployed BlueArc Titan

BlueArc Corporation, a leader in scalable, high-performance unified network storage, today announced that Backup Technology has deployed a BlueArc Titan storage solution at the heart of its data protection services, which serve as a lifeline to data for customers from the British Red Cross to the City of London and Liverpool Football Club. The leading UK backup and disaster recovery provider, Backup Technology, depends on the world-record-breaking performance of BlueArc technology for the data-intensive process of backing up hundreds of millions of customer files with unsurpassed reliability and accuracy.

Backup Technology offers secure off-site data protection in its state-of-the-art data centers. A pioneer in automated online backup and recovery, Backup Technology protects more than 350 terabytes of customer data and has seen demand for its vault capacity-the largest in the UK-surge more than 300 percent since 2007, as its customers seek more secure and reliable methods of protecting vital business and enterprise data. With the leap in demand and related backup activity, this service provider chose a BlueArc Titan cluster to replace legacy network attached storage and ensure it met service level requirements for recording and restoring data.

"We pioneered online backup and recovery, and Backup Technology’s success is supported by our customers’ experience," said Simon Chappell, managing director and co-founder, Backup Technology. "Our competitive advantage depends on our performance, and to protect it, we chose BlueArc. Other BlueArc customers’ reports and our own technical evaluation confirmed that only Titan and its distinctive hardware-based architecture could scale and ensure file system integrity for millions and millions of small files."

Backup Technology pursued an aggressive implementation plan including loading 275 million files in a single volume. In addition to the sheer quantity of input/output operations per second (IOPS) that must be processed by its storage infrastructure, Backup Technology uses a single tier of serial ATA (SATA) disk storage, which simplifies access to data but also concentrates the load on NAS systems. Automated monitoring by Backup Technology’s sophisticated televaulting software indicated that BlueArc consistently and reliably completed concurrent processes and preserved data integrity where the legacy NAS storage had backlogged and had not finished tasks.

Moving forward, Backup Technology anticipates its vault capacity may reach 100 terabytes and 1 billion files. This potential for growth also factored into the company’s selection of BlueArc technology: While Backup Technology evaluates its technical options for expansion, its requirements for data recovery and storage scalability are inflexible.

For Chappell, the BlueArc Titan cluster is an investment in the future, and the BlueArc support team demonstrates long-term commitment. "I’m very impressed by the accessibility and responsiveness of the BlueArc support team," said Chappell. "When we made some planned changes to our network, our IT director heard from the BlueArc team within minutes of the cutover. It gives me tremendous peace-of-mind that BlueArc technical staff can monitor Titan server performance that closely."

Backup Technology is the UK’s leading online backup & disaster recovery provider, protecting more than 500 terabytes of data, comprising of more than 2 billion files. Formed in 2005, Backup Technology specializes in the provision of secure automated online backup services to SMEs and enterprises.

The company has considerable expertise in performing disaster recovery on individual servers and entire networks to ensure that customers have complete business continuity, and offers worldwide support for all customers and data types from 10GB to 100TB.