New BlueArc Mercury' Network Storage System Unleashes High-end Storage To A Broader Market

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 7, 2009--BlueArc' Corporation today introduced the BlueArc Mercury' series: a premium, network storage platform that delivers exceptional business and technological benefits to the commercial midrange market. A leader in scalable, high performance unified network storage, BlueArc designed the Mercury platform to deliver its award-winning data management, scalability and performance in a midrange solution that overcomes the storage challenges faced today by an ever-increasing number of customers.

As the volume of unstructured, file-based data continues to explode, and retention and archiving demands increase, companies of all sizes struggle to keep pace. While traditional network storage solutions have offered some relief, they have resulted in the unintended creation of storage silos, filer sprawl, poor utilization rates and lagging performance. BlueArc Mercury addresses these storage inefficiencies with a powerful file system and hardware platform that allows companies to consolidate users, applications and storage systems in order to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their storage infrastructure, all without giving up performance.

"Many midsize companies face enterprise-sized storage challenges and until now, traditional solutions have created unintended downstream challenges and costs," said Michael Gustafson, president and CEO, BlueArc. "The Mercury Series brings the power of five generations of proven BlueArc technology to the customer who's unwilling to compromise on price, scalability or performance. This midrange solution squarely meets the needs of today's customers who are pressured to manage growth and accomplish more with less cost and with reduced complexity."

A Storage Analyst's View
"The rapid growth in unstructured data and rich content is a growing problem for all businesses, but to date, only larger enterprises could afford the large, high-performance, file-based storage solutions required to address this growth," noted Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Solutions like BlueArc's new Mercury platform will make it possible for midsized enterprises to cost-effectively address their own unstructured data needs without sacrificing performance."

BlueArc Mercury Benefits
The Mercury platform is the first to deliver BlueArc's advanced file system performance and crucial data management functionality at a midmarket price point. Mercury's performance and scalability support greater utilization of storage infrastructure to increase storage efficiency and promote consolidation. At the heart of Mercury is SiliconFS', BlueArc's field-proven and award-winning file system. SiliconFS is the central engine that manages all data movement within Mercury, delivering sustained, predictable performance across the storage infrastructure. It includes a comprehensive virtualization tool set which simplifies administration of the file system, as well as enabling BlueArc Intelligent Tiered Storage.Intelligent Tiered Storage comprises BlueArc Data Migration and Dynamic Read Caching capabilities, which are supported by policy-based management functionality. These advanced features allow administrators to set policies based on common file attributes or access patterns to ensure that data is automatically and transparently migrated to the appropriate tier of storage--optimizing cost and performance.  

"More and more, customers have created tiers of storage within their infrastructures in order to match the value of the content being stored to the right-value storage tier," said Bridget Warwick, vice president of marketing at BlueArc. "However, what they have found is that it is tremendously difficult, if not impossible, to actually move the data from one tier and system to another. With BlueArc's built-in intelligent tiering, customers can employ policies to quickly and transparently move data from one tier to another without affecting system performance or requiring administrative time."

When delivered through the BlueArc Mercury platform, SiliconFS helps customers consolidate their unwieldy legacy storage environments, improve their storage utilization ratios, and simplify the administration of their infrastructure, all of which result in cost savings and reduced complexity.

A Customer's View
At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has long employed BlueArc storage systems. Work in the lab has a broad variety of technical requirements; the Speech Recognition team is an example of a group with huge numbers of small files requiring very fast I/O throughputs. "While performance is critical, it's not the only factor; manageability is also crucial to us," said Jack Costanza, assistant director of infrastructure at the lab. "BlueArc's file system was the only one we found that had both the performance and ease of administration that we needed to keep our lab staff happy. Now with the Mercury platform, there's a cost-effective way to scale out our existing infrastructure without sacrificing the performance and administrative simplicity that we have come to rely on."

Roads to Market
The new Mercury Series storage servers, like the existing Titan family of storage systems, will be sold through multiple channels including BlueArc's direct sales force, an expanded reseller network, and via OEM partners."Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc have a longstanding strategic partnership, and our High-performance NAS Platform continues to outscale and outperform the competition to provide customers with file service optimization and improved efficiency," said Brian Householder, senior vice president, worldwide marketing and business development, Hitachi Data Systems. "BlueArc's introduction of Mercury as a midrange network storage platform complements our ongoing focus of bringing enterprise storage capabilities to new markets, and we will continue to work together to provide midrange customers with highly scalable, enterprise-class file sharing, multiprotocol support and consolidation solutions."
About BlueArc
BlueArc partners with customers to solve their storage and data management-related business challenges. BlueArc's best-of-breed, high-performance, highly scalable and cost-effective storage solutions help to accelerate our customers' success. Information about BlueArc solutions and services can be found at http://www.bluearc.com/.