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Following hot on the heels of the Titan 1100 (an entry level model introduced in late 2007), the latest additions to the BlueArc Titan product family are the 3100 and 3200, which officially debut at CeBit in March 2008. The Titan 3000 (as these additions get grouped and called for ease) builds upon BlueArc‘s ability to derive astounding capacity and performance numbers from its unique architecture. This is another significant step up for BlueArc and the Titan family; doubling what were already industry-leading capabilities in the product. The scaling capability across the entire Titan range (where modularity means every earlier or lower model is upgradeable to boot) is impressive. The announcement can be summarized by:
The New Titan 3000 – _doubles down‘ on the very fast and very scalable Titan 2000 series to offer up to 200,000 IOPS, 20Gb/sec throughput and 4 petabytes of storage capacity.1 That‘s very fast and very big... and, by the way, the Titan 3000 costs the same as the Titan 2000, which already compared very favorably against competitive offerings. To help harness this raw power usefully, the Titan 3000 is capable of supporting up to 64 secure virtual servers and 8 cluster nodes. BlueArc has also added an API to the Titan 3000, which enables user customization and enhanced flexibility (via its expanded partner infrastructure) as well as new search and indexing capabilities. The overall product is scalable, bladed, modular and remains balanced even as its dimensions grow. The Management Platform - the existing Titan software suite is extended to the Titan 3000, offering virtualization (everything from block and file access to thinly-provisioned storage pools), storage management (notably a tiered storage capability, as well as rich migration and replication functions) and data protection (ranging from snapshot capabilities to a WORM offering). The GUI interface makes it easy to take advantage of all the underlying complexity and capability. Titan Applicability - although its diversity and wide-ranging abilities can ironically be a challenge (covered later in this brief), the simple truth is that the Titan product range can handle just about any application. Figure 1 gives some idea of the diverse range of integration and application use. It shows a wide range of applications which are using a combination of iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. On the back-end are both FC and SATA disk drives, configured at different RAID levels (here the dynamic transactional data is shown on RAID 10 for optimal performance and protection, while the bulk, persistent data is on a more economical RAID 5). The key to much of the Titan 3000‘s ability is the parallel architecture that BlueArc has employed from day one. It underpins the scalability and flexibility of the product and allows the sort of specifications that were hitherto seen as just pipe dreams by other storage system suppliers. Two recent ESG Briefs on Titan were entitled _2X Everything_ (2006), and _Storage for All Seasons_ (2007)—one could wonder where to go from there, and yet now they have _2X‘d‘ again and still have an almost unbelievable range of applicability. But who truly needs all this power? Where is all this performance and capacity used?
Where, What and Why – the Fit for Titan 3000
The relevance of Titan 3000 is simple: IT and storage demands fluctuate with new applications and users, so critical aspects like capacity and performance management are increasingly an art rather than science. Certainly, there is a group of users who always need the maximum in performance and capacity—for whom more is never enough. These are the people who know what they want. Somewhat oddly, the second, larger, and growing group of users who need something like Titan 3000 are those who don‘t accurately know what they need! To explain: today‘s enterprises, driven by new market and social requirements, increasingly need to be able to access unparalleled and flexible scalability, both easily and quickly. And yet, simultaneously, they need to maintain operational control of their environment. Traditional architectures were (and are) intentionally rigid and inflexible, and not suited to a world of unknown and/or morphing requirements. Some examples of specific environments, where the Titan 3000 best fits, are described as follows: Consolidation Being able to consolidate onto one platform that can genuinely provide many levels of service, protection, performance and management.
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