Hitachi Data Systems Buys NAS Partner BlueArc

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced a milestone in its strategy to give customers seamless access to all data, content and information with the acquisition of BlueArc Corporation, in scalable, high performance network storage.

Building upon a 5 year OEM partnership, Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc will give customers the combination of Hitachi enterprise-class quality, reliability and support with BlueArc NAS.

Hitachi Data Systems completed the acquisition of all outstanding shares of BlueArc in an all cash transaction. Wells Fargo Securities was the exclusive financial advisor to Hitachi Data Systems. BofA Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisor and Credit Suisse as a co-advisor to BlueArc for this transaction.

IDC predicts that by 2014 more than 83 percent of enterprise storage system capacity will be shipped for file-based data, taking the CAGR for file serving storage capacity to 2.5 times the CAGR for block storage capacity.

With this acquisition, Hitachi Data Systems is making a move to address the fastest growing segment of the storage market. BlueArc has been delivering high-performance enterprise NAS solutions to customers in a variety of markets such as health and life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications, energy and e-discovery – where digital content and unstructured (file-based) data is growing at exponential rates. These industries are also faced with the challenges of ‘big data’ – data sets so large that they become difficult to store, search, access, share and analyze.

Significant Milestone in HDS Strategy
to Transform Traditional Data Centers
to Information Centers
With this acquisition, HDS is executing on its strategy to transform traditional data centers into information centers – where customers can store and access all data, content and information. Information that is available and searchable from anywhere and at any time. Information that is independent of the infrastructure, independent of the application and can be securely and cost-effectively accessed, searched, managed and governed forever.

The HDS strategy is comprised of three integrated foundational components: infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud – all of which leverage virtualization technology from HDS to deliver efficiencies and cost savings to customers.

• The infrastructure cloud optimizes the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage and networking without impacting application performance.
• The content cloud leverages data intelligence tools to enable data indexing, search and discovery across platforms.
• The information cloud will apply information analytics to allow the independence of data from applications and usher in new capabilities of data re-use for business purposes.

BlueArc is a key link between infrastructure cloud and content cloud with its expertise in file-based virtualization, built-in intelligent tiering, automated data movement capabilities for unstructured data and integration with the Hitachi file, content and block portfolio. This enables customers to gain control of their unstructured data with seamless access, search, retention, consolidation and archiving capabilities.

HDS and BlueArc have collaborated on product definition since the beginning of the companies’ partnership, and this acquisition brings opportunities for tighter product development strategies.

"The exponential growth of digital content, particularly unstructured content, has had a dramatic effect on all businesses, including the requirements on IT," said Jack Domme, CEO, Hitachi Data Systems. "Over the past 5 years, BlueArc has been an integral part of our strategy to help customers store and manage unstructured data of all types, such as video, email, medical imaging, scientific data and more. Bringing BlueArc into the Hitachi family will enable us to better serve customers with more tightly integrated technologies, broader capabilities and deeper expertise globally. Our combined efforts will deliver cost-effective infrastructure cloud and content cloud solutions that customers can take advantage of as they look to further transform their data centers."

"Joining forces with Hitachi Data Systems is a win-win situation for our employees, our partners, our customers and our shareholders," said Mike Gustafson, CEO, BlueArc. "The strength of the long-standing partnership between the two companies spanning product integration, customer momentum and cross-functional collaboration is the foundation for this union. We are excited to accelerate our vision and innovation and to bring real solutions to customers, partners and the market. We view this as a critical time in information technology, where we will help customers assess and map their business priorities and deliver information services as we work collectively to continue to define next generation information centers amidst the expanding world of file and content."

BlueArc delivers highly scalable, high performance file storage to customers across a broad range of markets and is focused on solving the challenges faced by unstructured data at scale.

Its products are suited to customers seeking scalable solutions to the growth of unstructured data whether that growth is taking place in their enterprise data center, their high-performance computing environment or any place in between. With almost 1,000 customers worldwide, spanning markets such as media, life sciences, energy, hosted services and an increasing footprint in the virtualization-over-NFS storage market, BlueArc is one of the top vendors in the Gartner 2011 NAS Magic Quadrant’s Visionaries quadrant. BlueArc has been an OEM partner of Hitachi Data Systems since November 2006, powering the Hitachi NAS Platform family.

Hitachi Data Systems offers end-to-end enterprise virtualization capabilities for both file and block storage. Just as HDS has pioneered virtualization in the enterprise space, BlueArc is a leader in file-based virtualization, offering capabilities such as high performance, native intelligent tiering, scale to an 8-node cluster or 16 petabytes and virtualization of 3rd party NAS offerings for investment protection.