Air Guard Flight Data Analysis Soars With BlueArc Titan

BlueArc Corporation announced a state air guard’s deployment of a BlueArc Titan 3200 storage solution with a 6×1-gigabit Ethernet connection and 20 terabytes of Fibre Channel storage for secure data access and fast analysis of massive volumes of information captured from flight missions. Titan’s world-record throughput addresses the agency’s performance needs without adding complexity — an added advantage as the system expands to other users around the globe.

BlueArc implemented the solution with value-added reseller West Coast Technology (WCT), a nationwide specialist in data storage and protection. "As the agency considered the alternatives to prohibitively complex technology, we were challenged to find a solution that would deliver throughput, ease of use and security," said Rick Crane, CEO, WCT. "In our experience, only BlueArc Titan offers the performance of a storage area network, the simplicity of network attached storage, and support for multiple storage formats, so that government customers don’t have to make trade-offs that could jeopardize projects or classified information."

Among other tasks, the BlueArc solution plays an integral part in the final testing of software for quality assurance before it is implemented in F16 aircraft. A lean team of approximately 35 military personnel from the air guard, the state air reserve and active U.S. Air Force servicemen, government and contract staff work together at a National Guard base in the Southwest. The agency monitors and evaluates flight combat equipment and systems performance information collected from its squadron of F16 planes. A single test flight may produce as much as 10 to 15 terabytes of data and many times, multiple flights occur each day. Collection devices are connected directly to the air guard’s workstations and transferred to the Titan storage solution for analysis, and then data is archived to tape.

Faced with the challenge of enhancing its storage infrastructure just months before summer and peak test conditions, the air guard’s information technology team pursued an aggressive competitive evaluation of several leading storage products, with the additional requirement of a physical demonstration of throughput. In its San Jose lab, BlueArc demonstrated Titan 2000 series sustained throughput of 500 megabytes, and the customer chose the Titan 3000 series for performance even beyond the agency’s extreme-use case.

West Coast Technology and BlueArc deployed a storage infrastructure with 16 workstations and tape-based backup, using CommVault backup software. Titan 3200 provides the added advantage of capacity in excess of other vendors’ systems, making it possible to deploy Titan at the head of the storage infrastructure and 20 terabytes of disk space appearing as a single file system behind it. As a result, the air guard’s staff does not need additional expertise to manage multiple storage devices.
The air guard expects Titan’s performance and capacity will serve its changing needs and prove cost-effective for the long term. Recognizing that other agencies will have use for the data it collects, the air guard is considering offering analysis as a service to other organizations, and anticipates a corresponding increase in storage capacity. Titan 3000 series can expand up to 4 petabytes of usable space to accommodate the air guard’s future plans.