New Tiering, Caching Capabilities From BlueArc Titan

BlueArc Corporation announced new software enhancements to the company’s line of high performance Titan unified storage solutions. These innovations create a new industry milestone: a cost-effective, extraordinarily flexible, high-performance, tiered storage infrastructure that is easy to deploy and manage. The updates deliver thorough dynamic caching and intelligent tiered storage functionality, which will help data-driven businesses make their advanced storage strategies a reality. This rapid responsiveness is enabled by full utilization of a storage media mix that optimizes disk price and performance.

The new storage capabilities, available today, provide essential functionality to help companies balance storage performance and investment with the ability to move data between storage tiers as end-user demand dictates. Customers can take immediate advantage of this new functionality and extend infrastructures to include a broader range of storage media, as BlueArc today also extended their relationship with Texas Memory Systems, a leading provider of solid-state storage media.

"BlueArc customers run some of the world’s most demanding storage environments, so we understand the potential — and challenges — presented by tiered storage," said Steve Daheb, senior vice president of marketing and business development, BlueArc. "Our latest solutions clear technical hurdles that confined tiered storage to a rigid device hierarchy. Now companies can combine data and storage media in the manner that’s most cost-effective and efficient for their needs, without giving up performance."

Dynamic Caching: Right Place, Right Time, Right Medium
As data-driven businesses cannot afford to risk performance to unpredictable traffic and spikes in data demand, Dynamic Read Caching functionality takes the guesswork out of making sure data is in the right place at the right time — even for virtual servers. Users can create read-only caches accessible by all nodes in a Titan cluster or directly by a single Titan server, boosting application speed, response time and productivity.

Dynamic Read Caching also automatically copies data to a high-performance cache for faster access to content held in near-line serial advanced technology access (SATA) storage, archive or deduplication file systems. Instead of over-provisioning more expensive storage media, users can put more of their data on cost-effective SATA disks with the peace of mind that policy-based Dynamic Cache Management will automatically copy data to a faster storage tier as needed.

Dynamic caching features include:

• Automated administration and expiration of cached files based on user- selected criteria and policies
• Support for one to eight nodes, including virtual servers
• Support for up to 500,000 cache-enabled files
• Functionality for SATA, Fibre Channel and Solid State disk formats

Intelligent Tiered Storage:
Consolidation, Management over Data Lifecycle
The explosive growth of unstructured data makes it more and more difficult to manage data over the course of its lifecycle and avoid an unwieldy and underutilized storage infrastructure.

Intelligent Tiered Storage automates operations crucial to storage consolidation and greater resource utilization. New features bring policy-based automation to data management and migration back and forth between pairs of storage tiers, while cross-volume links support the seamless integration of external devices to best match workload.

Intelligent Tiered Storage features include:

• Policy scheduler for automated, transparent data migration
• Policy-based templates for automated management of data migration
• Scripting for complex policy implementations
• Software application programming interfaces (APIs) for third-party indexing products and migration from remote applications

Data Distribution, Retrieval: Greater Efficiency
The new capabilities also address a number of lesser storage functions that add up to significant performance improvements updates for the Titan 3000 series. Intelligent Write Balancing stripes data across the entire storage pool and rebalances data as and when it is modified. This operation ensures optimal use and function of storage resources without the performance degradation typical of conventional storage rebalancing.

When it comes to locating and retrieving data from massive repositories of unstructured files, BlueArc combines Search/Index and Data Migration application programming interfaces (APIs) to accelerate both functions. The latest BlueArc updates also support network file system (NFS) protocol version 4.

Cluster Performance: Higher Availability
To help customers sustain performance through planned upgrades and unanticipated outages, BlueArc has added improved capabilities for rolling upgrades and faster failover between nodes. Customers can update their storage cluster server by server, while the Titan system continues to perform. Enhancements to failover performance ensure that virtual servers and machines remained mapped to one another and perform failover functions concurrently, reducing failover time from minutes to seconds.

New BlueArc enhancements are available immediately.