STORAGE

BlueArc Corporation announced that Rice University has selected the company's Titan Storage System as the campus's central data repository, eliminating the need for more than 50 disparate file servers and dramatically easing storage management through consolidation. Titan was selected due to the system's high performance and capacity ceiling, capable of supporting the campus's rapidly growing data, while setting the foundation for future expansion, helping Rice better accomplish their academic, research and outreach missions. For Rice, leading edge technology resources are a critical success element for the university's thousands of students, faculty and researchers. Storage demands at Rice have been skyrocketing in recent years as the Internet and the campus network play an increasing role in the academic curriculum -- ranging from e-mail storage and file storage for course work programs and applications, to home directories and digital media archival. As data demands grew at all corners of the university, information was commonly housed in individual silos at departments or schools, eliminating the ability for storage to be managed by central IT -- putting student and faculty's academic research at risk. To offer users the true management and protection through the data's full lifecycle, an enterprise storage system was needed that offered capacity scaling into the hundreds of terabytes if necessary, while sustaining thousands of simultaneous user connections, delivering simplified management, and the ability to migrate data between tiers of storage based on policies or off-site for backup. After a thorough investigation into multiple Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) vendors, BlueArc's Titan was selected in an active-active configuration with 92 terabytes of multi-tiered storage, featuring both high performance Fibre Channel drives and high-density Serial ATA disks. "Titan provides Rice with a network storage platform that will scale in both performance and capacity to meet today's needs and those of the future," said Barry Ribbeck, director of systems architecture and infrastructure for Rice University. "BlueArc has delivered an architecture capable of supporting our growing university community, enabling us to greatly simplify our technology environment by eliminating dozens of servers as well as introducing new features such as Information Lifecycle Management. We are excited to provide our students, faculty and researchers a technology foundation they can rely on to securely store and quickly access their most-important data for years to come." "BlueArc continues to be impressed by how customers implement solutions to real-world problems, through a new approach to network storage -- both in the enterprise market and in academia, utilizing Titan's unique characteristics to their fullest potential," said Steve Daheb, vice president of marketing and business development for BlueArc. "We are pleased to work with Rice University as a key technology solution partner, enabling the university to consolidate resources and greatly simplify storage management." BlueArc's Titan Storage System is backed by a unique hardware-accelerated architecture that allows customers to scale their storage systems far beyond any other servers available on the market today. Titan's inherent ability to support primary, nearline, and archive storage within the same storage system enables customers to upgrade the system, utilizing the latest disk technology, when needed. Automatically storing data on the most appropriate storage dramatically reduces cost while maintaining access times consistent with application requirements. Titan allows a single file system to grow up to 256 terabytes and delivers throughput of up to 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The architecture adapts to changing application or capacity needs, thus simplifying management, accelerating productivity and protecting a customer's long-term investment. Alongside the system's hardware benefits, Titan also features an industry-leading software suite including virtual servers, policy-based data migration, iSCSI support, remote mirroring and a WORM file system.