March 04, 2008 08:00 ET

BlueArc Titan 3000 Storage Series Opens Door to Dynamic IT Infrastructure

Breakthrough Offering Removes Data Center Obstacles to Business Potential

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - March 4, 2008) - BlueArc® Corporation, a leader in scalable, high-performance unified network storage, today announced the BlueArc Titan 3000 series of unified storage solutions, doubling the world-record-holding performance and capacity of current BlueArc products -- at the industry's lowest price per IOP, all without increasing energy demands and environmental impact. Horizontal enterprises and vertical organizations in data-driven markets, can now take advantage of improved technology that has been battle-tested in the world's most demanding IT environments, which include Internet services, life sciences, entertainment, oil and gas exploration, design and simulation and electronic discovery. Additionally, BlueArc has expanded its leadership in harnessing the massive growth of unstructured data, through the introduction of an open application programming interface (API), which brings the Titan 3000's leading capabilities to the Company's diverse set of application partners.

Customers in all markets are grappling with processes that have grown incredibly data-intensive and complex due to increasing file sizes, a broadening user base, multiple remote offices with 24 by 7 data access demands and expanding volumes. From Web 2.0 applications for collaboration to oil and gas exploration, credit card processing and visual effects rendering, a wide range of enterprise activities demand storage flexibility and performance once reserved solely for hosted environments. As facility and energy costs rise, a flexible and dynamic infrastructure also promises to help organizations optimize their capital investments.

With the Titan 3000 series, BlueArc continues to deliver on its vision for the future-proof organization, where information can be accessed at the speed of change, enabling companies to scale at a new velocity. By building on distinctive hardware-based BlueArc storage architecture, the new Titan 3000 family supports file service consolidation with usable file system capacity of 256 terabytes -- 16 times that of the traditional market competition -- and four times the number of virtual servers, aimed to tailor storage offerings and management to customers' specific application and environmental demands.

Customers around the world rely on BlueArc unified storage solutions to bring important life sciences discoveries to market; deliver high quality visual effects for award-winning films and entertainment; offer scalable Internet and application services around the clock, and discover new sources for the world's energy. As yesterday's high-performance demands become increasingly mainstream in both verticals and the horizontal enterprise, with customers placing intense demands on storage operations, BlueArc has doubled the performance and scale of its products with each generation. Thanks to efficiencies in sourcing, supplier relationships and significant research and development, BlueArc is debuting the Titan 3000 series, with its new world-record capabilities, without increasing prices and delivering the lowest cost per IOP in the industry, thereby offering customers the opportunity to reduce complexity and simplify their infrastructures all while increasing their capabilities, but not their budgets.

"The BlueArc Titan 3000 series is designed to help businesses and organizations capitalize on intelligence by removing the obstacles to action and innovation," said Mike Gustafson, CEO and president for BlueArc. "Storage has lagged behind as the rest of the IT infrastructure has evolved into a utility that users can tap as needed. The BlueArc Titan 3000 series marks a significant milestone for our customers and for the company's vision, and we're pleased to offer a unified storage solution so powerful and so cost-effective that it replaces our current generation of products."

A New Intelligent Platform for File Services

A crucial step to making the most of data is integrating storage into business processes. The BlueArc Titan 3000 series features a new open API for partners and customers to create or modify applications to take advantage of the storage solution's software suite and underlying hardware capabilities.

Customers and partners can build intelligent file services with confidence that Titan's server architecture will sustain performance, regardless of the complexity of software applications and features that are added.

The BlueArc Titan 3000 series offers the Titan 3100 and the Titan 3200, delivering multiple options with respect to performance and price. Technical highlights of the Titan 3100 and Titan 3200 models include:

--  Titan 3200: Maximum performance of approximately 200,000 SPECsfs(1)
    IOPS (Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. System File Server Input/Output
    operations per second), maximum throughput at 20 gigabits per second and
    maximum capacity of 4 petabytes (usable).
--  Titan 3100: Maximum performance of approximately 100,000 SPECsfs IOPS,
    maximum throughput at 10 gigabits per second and maximum capacity at 2
    petabytes (usable).
    

Availability

Customers may purchase or upgrade to the BlueArc Titan 3000 series immediately. For more information, please call (866) 864-1040 or e-mail sales@bluearc.com.

About BlueArc

BlueArc is a leading provider of high-performance unified network storage systems to enterprise markets, as well as data intensive markets, such as electronic discovery, entertainment, federal government, higher education, Internet services, oil and gas and life sciences. Our products support both network attached storage, or NAS, and storage area network, or SAN, services on a converged network storage platform.

We enable companies to expand the ways they explore, discover, research, create, process and innovate in data-intensive environments. Our products replace complex and performance-limited products with high-performance, scalable and easy-to-use systems capable of handling the most data intensive applications and environments. Further, we believe that our energy efficient design and our products' ability to consolidate legacy storage infrastructures, dramatically increases storage utilization rates and reduces our customers' total cost of ownership. Information about BlueArc solutions and services can be found at http://www.bluearc.com/.

(1) For more details about the SPEC SFS benchmark and a current list of validated results, please visit www.spec.org/sfs97r1/results/sfs97r1.html.