The successors to the vendor's 2000 series products, the Titan 3000 series of storage servers from BlueArc are purpose built, modular offerings targeted primarily to high-performance NAS and nearline access and/or data archiving deployments. Two Titan 3000 servers are initially offered with aggregate throughput of up to 20 Gb/sec and support for storage pools of up 4 PB. Single file systems are limited to 256 TB in size, with multiple file systems supported in a Titan cluster.

The key feature of the Titan Server architecture is its modular, hardware-based design in which networking communications (TCP/IP for the frontend, FC for communications to the disk arrays on the backend, and 10 Gig XFP interconnects for inter-cluster communications) as well as file system access and management functions are all baked directly into the silicon of the modules; i.e., the core functionality of the servers is all hardware based. Further, these core functions are split into three sets of modules, each of which is dedicated to a specific task: The Network Interface Module, which includes the front-side Ethernet ports and connects to/communicates with hosts; the File System Modules, which provide file system access and management functionality and handle the actual processing of the CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FTP, and NDMP protocols; and the Storage Interface Module (SIM) which provides the physical FC connections to the disk arrays. The File System Modules, in particular, are split into two offerings: The top module, which handles the actual file system functions; and the bottom module which provides battery-backed NVRAM.

All four of the modules above (NIM, File System, NVRAM, and SIM) slide into the same chassis, where they can perform their tasks in parallel and enjoy 40 Gb/sec of backplane bandwidth for communications with the other modules in the chassis. Optional clustering support--via the interconnection of Titan servers via the interconnect ports on the SIM--enable the clustering of multiple Titans (up to eight) in active/active HA deployments.

The disk arrays connect to the servers via FC; though separate arrays are offered supporting the loading of FC or SATA drives. Both the standard RAID controller enclosures and the expansion array enclosures each house up to 16 drives; while the SA-48 RAID array holds up to 48 SATA drives in a 4U sub-system with support for RAID 6 protection.

Virtualization features of the platform provide the ability to define virtual servers (each Titan cluster can be partitioned into up to 64 logical servers, each with its own IP and management policies); virtual file systems based on a global name space for the consolidated storage pool; virtual volumes with support for thin provisioning; and virtual storage pools.

On top of this core platform, the vendor offers multiple software-based optional components (delivered via firmware upgrades) enabling specific storage-related features; including:

- Cluster Name Space, used in conjunction with HA clusters (described above) and providing a virtual file structure that can be mounted from any Titan server with global access to all data through any node in the cluster

- Data migration, replication, mirroring, and snapshot tools

- iSCSI-based access

- Dynamic Read Caching, which dynamically caches read data across a Titan cluster

New in the Titan 3000 series (in addition to the beefier hardware and performance), is the inclusion of a data migration and file management API, which also includes integration with Hitachi's HDDS platform for search and indexing, and Brocade's StorageX product for heterogenous global namespace and data migration.

The Titan 3000 Series servers are available now. Pricing starts at over $100,000.

Visit the BlueArc Web site for further information.