Advantage Sales and Marketing Selects Titan Solution From BlueArc

BlueArc Corporation today announced that Advantage Sales and Marketing, the leading consumer sales and marketing agency, has deployed two Titan storage systems to support the rapid growth of the company -- having recently merged 30 companies into one corporation. A single Titan is being deployed to handle the resulting increase in data from the merged companies, which has rocketed nearly 500 percent over the last six months alone, while the second Titan is being implemented for backup and data recovery. With more than 1,200 clients including GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, Schering-Plough, Del Monte, Quaker Oats, Tropicana, and Gatorade, Advantage Sales and Marketing specializes in outsourced sales, merchandising, category management, and marketing services to manufacturers, producers of food products and consumer packaged goods. Just a year and a half ago, Advantage was comprised of thirty separate companies before they were merged to help the company better compete in a consolidating industry. Approximately 13,000 Advantage employees access its databases, run reports and use e-mail via PCs and PDAs. Advantage is making full use of Titan's ability to deliver multiple tiers of storage in a single system, offering high-performance Fibre Channel for critical applications and lower-cost SATA for less critical data, including some applications and archived e-mail. Advantage partner Synegi, a system integrator with significant experience in delivering customer solutions for high availability storage and technology assessment, played an instrumental role in the design process -- recommending BlueArc's Titan to front-end more than 20 terabytes of storage. "With unmatched flexibility and performance, BlueArc was the ideal solution for us and it beats anything in the marketplace," said William Hiatt, national technology director. "The scalability of the Titan architecture provides us with a solution that is future proof, a key factor in our decision making process as we continue to grow rapidly as a corporation." "Titan offers fast-growing companies like Advantage Sales & Marketing the opportunity to scale their business without being forced to introduce complexity," said Steve Daheb, vice president of marketing for BlueArc. "Customers are recognizing significant benefits through unmatched scalability, performance and simplified ease of management, including advanced virtualization features for infrastructure consolidation." 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.