News

posted on 28 February 2008 10:10

High-end NAS supplier BlueArc is planning to increase the performance of its products and layer on file services.

CEO Mike Gustafson told analysts at a meeting on February 27th that BlueArc will improve the performance of its Titan 2000 series of hardware-accelerated network-attached storage (NAS) products. I/O bandwidth and throughput will both be uprated.

The background is the rampant growth business is seeing in file storage needs, particularly in vast files of unstructured data. Areas such as image rendering, genomic sequencing, web analytics, and oil and gas seismic processing were mentioned.

A movie can have frames of 50MB with a picture resolution of 4,000 pixels. A 200,000 frame block-buster movie means a file size of 10TB.

BlueArc wants to offer file services on top of its basic NAS capabilities and these will include:-

- indexing of content
- virtualisation
- disaster recovery
- de-duplication

Components or complete services will likely be provided by some of BlueArc partners, who were also present at the event.

For example, Ciena, Asigra (Televaulting) and BackBone (backup) could be involved in the disaster recovery, Index Engines in the indexing, and Brocade in the general file area network (FAN) services area. Virtualisation could come from Storwize.

No de-duplication supplier was mentioned. Potential suppliers include Diligent and Data Domain. BlueArc reseller and investor HDS has a reselling arrangement with Diligent so that supplier looks to be in pole position.

Gustafson said: "We will provide some of these services ourselves with our own IP and we will extend that by opening up our data and file management APIs to leverage other third-party capabilities."

Boosted BlueArc hardware will provide the processing and I/O power needed to host these services.

BlueArc is currently venture capital-backed and involved in arranging an IPO.