BlueArc Teams With Ocarina

Ocarina Networks announced that BlueArc Corporation will join the company’s ECOsphere partner program, enabling customers in data-driven vertical markets and enterprises focused on storage consolidation to optimize their capacity without impacting end user access or response times.

Ocarina has worked closely with BlueArc to develop a version of its content-aware compression and de-duplication offering for primary storage for the company’s Titan NAS product line. BlueArc customers can now greatly expand the storage capacity of their primary storage solutions in response to IT organization’s desire to maximize the value of their systems while reducing operating costs.

Unstructured data, including rich media content, e-mail, and compound documents such as Microsoft Office and PDF files, poses a problem for inline compression and sliding block deduplication solutions. Ocarina’s content-aware solution provides unmatched results on these types where traditional offerings fall short. The Ocarina solution is uniquely equipped to help companies in a range of industries deal with a massive growth in data, including digital images and video, image archives for healthcare, seismic archives for oil and gas, post-production graphics for movie studios and game developers, as well as the needs of the horizontal marketplace.

The Ocarina ECOsphere partner program, which BlueArc joins today, allows storage vendors to certify and integrate the Ocarina solution with their storage platform to provide a complete capacity-optimized storage solution, allowing customers to efficiently store huge amounts of file data in a single namespace on a single storage platform.

The companies’ combined solution allows one or more Ocarina appliances to be used as content-aware compression and de-dupe co-processors attached to the BlueArc Titan storage system, leveraging BlueArc’s cross volume link features to make it possible to create a compressed and de-duplicated tier of storage inside the BlueArc system that is transparently part of their single namespace.

"The seamless integration of Ocarina for primary de-duplication and compression with Titan enables our customers to reduce their capacity demands while recognizing world-record performance," said Steve Daheb, senior vice president of marketing and business development of BlueArc. "The joint solution helps data-driven customers reduce their costs while continuing to focus on growing their business."

"BlueArc is known for highest performance network storage. By working together in partnership, our customers can leverage the industry-leading performance of BlueArc, while creating a new tier of capacity optimized storage," said Murli Thirumale, CEO of Ocarina Networks. "BlueArc’s focus on data intensive markets, such as electronic discovery, entertainment, Internet services, oil and gas and life sciences, aligns perfectly with the capabilities of our solutions, making this a logical partnership with real benefits for end users."

The Ocarina/BlueArc bundle will be available for purchase in Q4 2008.