BlueArc With Storage Solution Suite for VMware over NFS

At VMworld, BlueArc Corporation announced a new suite of storage solutions for VMware over NFS. BlueArc’s new JetCenter for vSphere, Jet Clone and JetMirror software suite, combined with the BlueArc Titan and Mercury network storage platforms, enables customers to simplify storage, network and data management tasks to allow enterprise IT to deploy VMware more broadly, including mission critical applications.
 
Backing up data in a virtualized environment often creates headaches for IT managers, requiring close coordination between VMware administrators and the storage administrators to ensure backups are consistent and recoverable. BlueArc JetCenter GUI software simplifies management of snapshot based backup and recovery operations by directly integrating into the vCenter interface, allowing VMware administrators to use a familiar management interface to create backups or recover virtual machines or VMDK files.
 
"Virtualization can create great efficiencies and lower costs; however, shared storage for virtual machines frequently becomes complex to manage or becomes a bottleneck, slows down application performance and limits broad deployment," said Ravi Chalaka, senior director of solutions and product marketing at BlueArc. "VMware is providing full support for NFS because of the protocol’s reputation for simplicity, and BlueArc’s NFS IOPS (input/output operations per second) is more than double that of other NAS systems. As a result, BlueArc is an ideal solution to manage the random I/O of thousands of virtual machines, and combined with a complete storage software suite, it delivers maximum simplicity to avoid the headaches of SAN while eliminating the sprawl caused by traditional NAS systems."
 
JetClone, another new feature incorporated into the BlueArc SiliconFS file system, enables IT managers to lower their total cost of ownership with the industry’s most space efficient, writable VMDK file snapshots. With JetClone, users are able to maintain maximum performance and storage space by cloning only the container files rather than entire file systems while using the least amount of storage capacity. BlueArc’s 256 TB (terabyte) file system is 16 times larger than other leading brands that are limited to 16 TB file systems, thus eliminating limitations on the amount of data that can be written to VMDK clones.
 
BlueArc’s JetMirror is a new high-speed replication feature which significantly reduces the time required to replicate large, complex file systems for data protection and disaster recovery. JetMirror uses a unique object-based file system technology as an option to the existing file-based replication software. JetMirror provides the speed of block-based replication while replicating only the data, not empty blocks. It can replicate data over any distance, and users can run backups from the replicated file system for maximum data protection without any performance impact on the active file system. BlueArc Site Recovery Adaptor (SRA) for VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) is a certified solution which integrates VMware SRM with JetMirror to accelerate and ensure successful recovery by automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing recovery plans.
 
BlueArc Mercury and Titan storage systems, including its newest software release SiliconFS 7.0, are fully certified with VMware ESX 3.x and 4.x. Passing the extensive VMware-specified testing ensures that BlueArc systems are compatible with VMware vSphere 4 and ready for customer deployment. Additionally, BlueArc servers are fully certified with VMware SRM 4.x.
 
"Performance and scalability are core to BlueArc’s architectural design and fundamental to its value proposition," said Tony Asaro, senior consultant and founder of The INI Group. "As the market embraces NFS for VMware and the demands of the virtual data center require greater scalability and performance, BlueArc is poised to be a leading Enterprise-class storage system for VMware."