BlueArc Enhanced High-End NAS

BlueArc Corporation announced SiliconFS 7.0 and JetCenter, two enhancements to its NAS solutions for performance-intensive data management applications at IP Expo at Earls Court in London.
 
SiliconFS 7.0 is the latest iteration of the company’s file system software that delivers performance and scalability. New features include advanced metadata management for cost and disk efficiency, as well as file system enhancements that allow scaling up to 16 usable petabytes (PB) on a single node or cluster.

Meanwhile BlueArc’s new JetCenter for vSphere, Jet Clone and JetMirror software suite, combined with the BlueArc Titan and Mercury network storage platforms, enables customers to simplify storage, network and data management tasks to allow enterprise IT to deploy VMware more broadly, including mission critical applications.
 
"SiliconFS 7.0 and the JetCenter suite provide customers of our Titan and Mercury storage systems with superior performance, scalability and value for their high-performance network storage applications," said Ravi Chalaka, senior director of solutions and product marketing at BlueArc. "With these latest additions we have resolved many of the management bottlenecks and headaches that customers commonly experience with competing solutions."
 
The optimised metadata handling option in SiliconFS 7.0 enables customers to use fewer high performance disks combined with lower cost disks without compromising BlueArc’s performance. It delivers this efficiency by automatically separating the metadata from the user data, placing the metadata on the fastest tier of storage being used (SAS or Solid State Disk), and placing the rest of the user data on the slower, less expensive tier. In turn, metadata operations are accelerated to improve overall system performance, while reducing the amount of high-performance storage required.
 
SiliconFS 7.0 also includes a number of file system enhancements which increase the maximum storage capacity of the BlueArc platforms. BlueArc Mercury systems now support up to 8PB of usable storage, while the company’s Titan family now supports up to 16 usable PB on a single node or cluster, making it the highest capacity in the industry. Unlike many competitive capacity claims which cite raw numbers, BlueArc capacities reflect usable space net of any RAID or management overhead.
 
JetCenter simplifies the management of snapshot based backup and recovery operations in a virtualised environment by directly integrating into the vCenter interface, allowing VMware administrators to use a familiar management interface to create backups or recover virtual machines or VMDK files. It comprises three elements the JetCenter GUI, JetClone, a feature that allows users to clone container files rather than entire file systems and JetMirror, a new high-speed replication feature which significantly reduces the time required to replicate large, complex file systems for data protection and disaster recovery.
 
With JetClone, BlueArc’s 256 TB (terabyte) file system is 16 times larger than other brands that are limited to 16 TB file systems, thus eliminating limitations on the amount of data that can be written to VMDK clones.
 
BlueArc Mercury and Titan storage systems, including its newest software release SiliconFS 7.0, are certified with VMware ESX 3.x and 4.x. Passing the VMware-specified testing ensures that BlueArc systems are compatible with VMware vSphere 4 and ready for customer deployment. Additionally, BlueArc servers are certified with VMware SRM 4.x.