New BlueArc Mercury(TM) Network Storage System Unleashes High-End Storage to a Broader Market

SAN JOSE, CA, Jul 07 (MARKET WIRE) --
BlueArc(R) Corporation today introduced the BlueArc Mercury(TM) 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(TM), 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/.

What Others Are Saying about the BlueArc Mercury Launch

Analyst Community:

ESG

"ESG research tells us that in midmarket and large enterprises, an average
of 70 discrete systems are typically utilized for storing and serving file
based data -- a number that is growing instead of shrinking," said ESG
Founder and Senior Analyst Steve Duplessie. "The whole world is trying to
consolidate application servers via virtualization, but perhaps the
biggest gain will end up coming when we consolidate our file
infrastructures. A platform like Mercury could be a great place to start."

INI

"The BlueArc Mercury is a very valuable storage system," said Tony Asaro,
senior consultant and founder, the INI Group. "It is extremely
intelligent, provides high performance for just about any application or
workload and it is using BlueArc's field-proven technology. Additionally,
we are seeing IT professionals embracing NFS with VMware and Mercury
offers a great solution for the pervasive server virtualization market."

Dragon Slayer Consulting

"The uncontrolled growth of unstructured data has caused a massive sprawl
of filers and a management nightmare," said Marc Staimer, president and
CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "BlueArc's Mercury Series is targeted at
containing and managing that sprawl for midtier IT organizations by
leveraging BlueArc's traditional advantages of performance, scalability,
and data management."

Gartner

"The current tough economic climate and tight IT budget force users to
look for more cost-effective NAS solutions to address their continually
growing unstructured data," said Pushan Rinnen, research director at
Gartner. "This will help drive innovation and competition in the midrange
NAS arena."

Beta Customers:

Sanborn

Sanborn, with mapping roots dating back to 1866, provides innovative
spatial solutions that guide and support decisions confronting
governments, businesses, and organizations around the world. A BlueArc
customer since 2002, Sanborn relies on the performance and reliability of
its storage solutions to manage the rendering and post-processing
functions of millions of high-density geospatial images. "The faster and
more productive we are processing our images, the shorter our time to
revenue," said Doyle Heisler, IT director at Sanborn. "With Mercury's
feature-set and price-point, I can now envision our smaller, remote
locations moving to BlueArc to manage their workloads under a
consolidated infrastructure."

Helphire plc

The Helphire Group, the UK's market-leading accident management company,
utilizes BlueArc solutions for a number of high-end applications.
Currently, the company uses a single non-BlueArc storage solution to run
both its Test/Dev file services and its DR/Backup functions. "Combining
the functions on a single system helped us justify its acquisition cost,
but we have compromised on performance," said Giles Ogram, senior
infrastructure engineer at Helphire Group plc. "The amazing performance
we have seen from Mercury, along with its mid-market pricing, gives us an
affordable, no-compromise option which we have not had before."

ISV Partner Community:

Asigra

"Regardless of the economy, information growth continues to drive IT
priorities -- an increasing challenge for organizations drawing from
shrinking IT budgets," said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of
Asigra. "As a result of our relationships with partners such as BlueArc,
we are providing customers with a simple answer to complex backup and
recovery concerns. As a result, IT resources are being utilized for
projects that move the business forward versus getting caught up in the
minutiae of backup."

IPRO

Paramount in IPRO's decision to partner with BlueArc is the speed with
which the network storage system can be deployed for faster, more
efficient IPRO e-Discovery performance. "With the advent of ESI, hardware
components have assumed a pivotal role in litigation, where time is
always a critical issue," said Jim King, CEO of IPRO. "BlueArc enables
IPRO customers to benefit from a low cost-per-gigabyte to process ESI
through improved productivity and efficiency derived from high sustained
data throughput with unequaled accuracy."

Channel Partner Community:

NASI

"BlueArc's new Mercury server helps tackle two of the large issues facing
mid-sized IT departments today: contracting or frozen budgets, and the
explosive growth of file-based data storage," said John Bettenburg, vice
president of NASI's Solutions Group. "Many of these departments have an
overly complex storage infrastructure as a result of past decisions, which
negatively affects performance and makes management difficult. The BlueArc
Mercury Series delivers the capabilities required to support
virtualization, storage tiering, and policy-based protection, which help
them consolidate and simplify their IT infrastructures."

VarData

"The BlueArc Mercury platform provides a significant advantage to
companies that want a midmarket storage solution," said Jeff Coke,
founder and president of VarData. "Simplified storage administration and
streamlined data management enable our customers to save time and money,
while at the same time building a practical long-term infrastructure. We
are delighted to be teaming with BlueArc to provide this much-needed,
cost-effective solution."

Xiologix

"Xiologix is pleased to bring our customers the new Mercury product line,"
said Jason Sparks, vice president of storage and systems, Xiologix. "We
like the direction that BlueArc took in developing the Mercury platform,
which will address many constraints we have faced in delivering low-cost,
high-performance NAS solutions. The Mercury platform is a game changer for
those customers who wish to spend less without giving up performance,
reliability or functionality, and other vendors who compete on price now
will have to contend with BlueArc's reputation as the performance leader."

Contact:
Kort van Bronkhorst
BlueArc Corporation
(408) 576-6684
kvanbronkhorst@bluearc.com

Copyright 2009, Market Wire, All rights reserved.

-0-