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BlueArc Virtual Servers

Harness the Power of Your Titan/Mercury Server Pool. Virtual Server Allows Rapid Response to the Changing Needs of Your Business.

BlueArc Titan and Mercury servers are used today in a number of demanding production and data center environments. When intensive development, computational or processing efforts are underway to meet high priority projects or deadlines, they can often create peaks in storage demand that require additional data throughput and data processing power.

Representing a new paradigm in network storage access for end users, Virtual Servers now allow administrators to control performance, capacity and tiers of storage as a single, common shared resource. Enabling IT groups to rapidly optimize storage performance and improve storage availability, Virtual Servers offer powerful functionality that lets administrators quickly assign or reassign which physical BlueArc server can access a common pool of storage.

With Virtual Servers, mount points are no longer tied to a physical server. Instead, the solution offers virtual mount points that let each VirtualServer be quickly moved within a common Titan or Mercury server farm. On the backend SAN infrastructure, all servers in the farm share a common pool of storage. Since the data itself is not moved, however, migrating a VirtualServer becomes nearly instantaneous.

By migrating Virtual Servers to other servers in the farm, administrators can now instantly respond to current spikes in demand for high data throughput as they relate to current project workloads and usage patterns. As needs change throughout the day, administrators can respond accordingly by optimizing the load balancing, availability or processing available. Application or workgroup-specific Virtual Servers can also be created to segregate clients for resource sharing or more logical management.

Virtual Servers in Action: Focusing the Data Processing Power Where You Need It

With Virtual Servers, rendering, computational or production projects that require additional time, speed and storage resources can now be moved to a dedicated or less busy server in the storage pool. When processing is completed, they can be instantly moved back to their initial configuration.

Similarly, if a Titan or Mercury server needs maintenance work, Virtual Servers on the physical device can be quickly moved to another server with no disruption in service, and then moved back when the server becomes available again.

By breaking the tie between the physical servers and their associated storage, Virtual Servers allow administrators to avoid bottlenecks and improve processing power by using the power of multiple Titan and Mercury servers in a communal pool of BlueArc servers.

Administrators can add any number of BlueArc servers to the virtual pool, with each one capable of hosting up to 64 Virtual Servers at a time. Virtual Servers can also be moved between either clustered or non-clustered Titan and Mercury servers and can be configured to support automatic failover of Virtual Servers within a high availability cluster in the event a physical device goes down.

Now, using a single management console from any server contained in the pool, it's easy to manage all storage volumes, Virtual Servers, and Titan and Mercury systems.

For today's on-demand, rapid-response IT environments, Virtual Servers ensures a new level of quality on demand not previously attainable in network storage environments.

Virtual Server Highlights

• Up to 64 virtual servers per Titan/Mercury
• Separate IP addresses and policies
• Port assignment for performance management
• Migration of virtual servers with their policies between Titans/Mercuries
• Clustering support with failover and recovery