BlueArc Gets Cheap

NAS vendor BlueArc Corp. is the latest storage company to roll out ATA disk drive options, aiming to provide lower-cost alternatives for its systems, which have previously been available only with Fibre Channel drives (see BlueArc Touts Multi-Tiered Storage).

The company's Multitiered Storage (MTS) strategy is supposed to let customers use both ATA and FC drive enclosures with different price/performance characteristics depending on their application needs -- all in the same rack. "This is pretty much our roadmap for the year," says Geoff Barrall, BlueArc's CTO and founder.

The lower-priced drives will let users consolidate all kinds of different data, from online archives to high-performance databases, into a single system, BlueArc says. "Normally when you deploy storage, you have to know what the storage is going to be doing for the rest of its life," says Barrall. "People don't want to spend money on 15,000-RPM disks for home directories."

The ATA-drive options, available for any of BlueArc's Si8000-series SiliconServers, are built around an ATA-to-Fibre Channel bridge licensed from Nexsan Technologies. That component allows it to slot in lower-performance, high-capacity ATA drive enclosures behind the same NAS front end as its faster FC disks. The ATA drives, manufactured by Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO), include a 250-Gbyte model available now and a 300-Gbyte version that will be available later this year.

Table 1: BlueArc's Multitiered Disk Options

Is this an interesting development? Definitely. But a breakthrough? Not really.

BlueArc claims it now has the industry's first NAS storage systems that allow customers to mix and match ATA and Fibre Channel drives. However, its two main rivals -- EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) -- as well as Spinnaker Networks Inc. and several other vendors, have already been aggressively tapping this trend over the past year (see Spinnaker Plops In ATA, EMC Sells Petabyte of Centera, StorageTek Puts Backups on Auto, StorageTek to Punch Into Disk Backup, Is EMC's Centera Getting Traction?, EMC Has Eyes for Huge Archives, and NetApp's Backup Plan).

But Jeff Allen, senior VP of marketing at BlueArc, insists that its "multitiered" storage provides greater granularity and functionality, at lower pricing, than any of its competitors. BlueArc systems with ATA drives will cost around $40,000 for 1 Tbyte and $100,000 for 10 Tbytes, he says.

By comparison, EMC's Centera, a high-end system that's purpose-built for archiving fixed content, starts at $148,000 for 8 Tbytes. NetApp's NearStore ATA-based systems start at 12 Tbytes; the company says these systems now are priced around 1 cent per Mbyte. Neither of those systems allows both ATA and FC drives in the same system. EMC has also started offering ATA drives for its Clariion family of SAN storage arrays -- which do allow a combination of FC and ATA drives behind the same controller -- priced at $171,000 for 10 Tbytes (see EMC Backs Clariion Into ATA).

While it's no jaw-dropping feat of engineering, the fact that BlueArc is delivering ATA drives shows that it's able to keep pace with shifting market dynamics. And the five-year-old company is continuing to grow its headcount, another good sign that it's finding success. Currently it's at around 200 employees, up from 160 in September 2002; most of the new hires are salespeople or field engineers. To date, the company says it has shipped 200 systems to around 50 customers.BlueArc has raised $110 million from investors that include Celtic House Venture Partners, Apax Partners, Dell Ventures, and J.P. Morgan Chase Bank & Co.

Allen says BlueArc is aiming to achieve profitability in early 2004. Can the company make it? It's clearly marching in the right direction.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch