Tolly Group Tested BlueArc Titan 3200

BlueArc Corporation announced that the Titan 3200 storage system has achieved exceptionally high throughput results certified in an ‘Up to Spec’ test conducted by The Tolly Group.

Rigorous tests simulated the I/O-intensive operations typical of customer environments. The Tolly Group measured the throughput of a single Titan 3210 and a two-node cluster, using NFS protocol to access files in write-only, read-only and mixed read/write operations. Titan delivered near wire-speed throughput for sequential read-only operations over 10-Gigabit Ethernet connections. For read-only tasks with blocks of various sizes, Titan sustained throughput averaging 1,100 megabytes per second, and sustained an average of 898 megabytes per second for write-only tasks. The two-node cluster consistently doubled performance in the same tests.

The Tolly Group attributes Titan’s performance to its distinctive hardware-based architecture. "Tolly Group test results show that Titan 3210 offers excellent throughput using NFS Ver 3 in UNIX/Linux environments," said Kevin Tolly, president, CEO and founder of The Tolly Group. "When clustered, the system is even more impressive, doubling performance without showing any sign of degradation that would normally be caused by cluster overhead — performance issues that are typically compounded by stability problems that come with the addition of more nodes."

The Tolly Group’s ‘Up to Spec’ certification assures end-users that equipment lives up to vendor promises. The Tolly Group tests are designed to evaluate products in an environment typically found in Fortune 1000 companies. After rigorous testing and thorough evaluation, the certification is presented to products that perform as promised, and serves as a helpful resource for end-user product selection. The results have been published in a report.

"The Tolly Group has independently validated perhaps the most distinctive capability of our technology — its ability to scale up as well as out," said Jon Affeld, BlueArc’s senior director of product marketing and business development. "With the industry’s leading performance in both throughput and IOPS, our customers are able to support a diverse range of high performance and data intensive applications on a single system. Beyond the performance advantage, the unique BlueArc architecture also enables our customers to enjoy dynamic caching, intelligent storage tiering, simplified management, lower power consumption, and reduced total cost of ownership."

The Tolly Group findings with respect to Titan performance concur with evaluation against the SPECsfs97_R1.v3 benchmark last spring. Titan set a new world record for performance, beating its previous world record by delivering single node system performance 194,909 ops/sec for a single namespace, with an overall response time (ORT) of 2.43 msec.