STORAGE

BlueArc Corporation, provider of the world's highest performance network storage systems, announced that Zhone Technologies, a dynamic telecom equipment manufacturing company, has deployed BlueArc's Titan to integrate different storage systems from several recent acquisitions. As the most scalable storage system on the market, the Titan system is enabling Zhone to consolidate multiple network attached storage (NAS) filers, manage data across the entire organization and dramatically improve efficiency. Zhone has completed four major acquisitions in the past three years, including the most-recent acquisition of Paradyne Networks, completed this September. For Zhone's IT team, this rapid growth presents the challenge of merging disparate storage systems and ensuring that the data from each acquired company is easy to manage, access, protect and store. "We evaluated offerings from all the leading vendors, and it quickly became clear that Titan is the only storage system that can keep the pace with our rapid growth," said Rick Barbieri, Zhone Technologies IT manager. "Titan gives our employees the power to retrieve even the largest data set on our ERP system without a second thought, and the system is flexible enough to scale as we become a larger company. Cost-efficiency, productivity and performance -- that's what mattered to us when we were considering different systems, and Titan has exceeded our expectations." Zhone sought a storage solution capable of addressing the demands of the company's Oracle 8i-based ERP system, as well as source code development and workgroup storage. The storage solution also needed top-level performance and scalability, without excessive costs for initial system deployment, services and support. After significant testing and comparison with competitive vendors, Zhone selected BlueArc's Titan storage system, with more than 30 terabytes of high-performance Fibre Channel storage. Zhone deployed an active-active clustered Titan system at corporate headquarters in Oakland, California, and a second, smaller system at the company's branch office in Georgia. Steve Daheb, BlueArc's vice president of marketing, said that the Zhone deployment is an excellent example of the way a strong storage strategy delivers measurable business value. "Zhone's vision for storage extends beyond the data center to integrate the silos of data that often exist across business units and departments that have been added to the enterprise through acquisition," Daheb said. "BlueArc is making it possible for organizations like Zhone to reduce operating costs, consolidate their NAS infrastructure and, ultimately, serve customers more efficiently. Our goal is to deliver the ultimate in storage solutions through Titan's unmatched feature set and with a business model that enables customers to dramatically reduce their total cost of ownership." 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.