BlueArc Scales Up for Services

BOSTON -- NAS specialist BlueArc discussed plans to bulk up its hardware as the basis for a set of third-party file services at an analyst and media meeting here today.

"There's no doubt about where the growth of data creation is coming -- it's file-based, unstructured data," explained BlueArc CEO Mike Gustafson, highlighting demand from data intensive markets such as genomic sequencing, image rendering and the oil and gas industries, as well as emerging markets such as Web analytics.

Execs explained that enhancements to BlueArc's flagship Titan family are in the pipeline, which are likely to include a performance hike on its 2-Pbyte Titan 2000 Series. "This will include increased I/O and throughput," said Gustafson. "The horsepower in our system has the capability to be a lot, lot more."

"In media and entertainment, for example, where shots have gone from a resolution of 2,000 to 4,000 pixels, it creates a 50-Mbyte file per frame," said the CEO, adding that over 200,000 frames are used in creating some of the latest Hollywood blockbuster movies.

The vendor is also planning to add a set of file services to a future release of its hardware, including content indexing, data reduction, virtualization, and disaster recovery. Additional file services will include data de-duplication, although BlueArc execs were tight-lipped on who will provide this.BlueArc partners attending today's event included Brocade, HDS, Asigra, BakBone, Storwize, Ciena, and Index Engines, so it appears likely that these firms will be involved in the vendor's file services strategy.

"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," explained Gustafson.

BlueArc, which competes with EMC's Celerra and NetApp's FAS and V Series products, is clearly looking to give its systems a performance boost to lay the foundation for its set of yet-to-be-announced services. "This gives you the headroom to run these file services at very high speeds," explained Jon Affeld, senior director of product marketing.

At least one BlueArc user said that he is keen to take a look at these enhancements, largely thanks to the vendor's file services roadmap. "The entertainment industry is just about the worst for structuring data -- these people are creative," said Tom Burns, director of post production infrastructure at movie company Technicolor , explaining that his organization sometimes creates up to three and a half Tbytes of new data every night.

The exec, whose firm worked on Spider-Man 3 for Sony Pictures, explained that he is particularly interested in shaving his data footprint. "I am very interested in de-duplication, I have an enormous need for these features.BlueArc also provided an insight into its ongoing efforts to become a public company at today's event. "We went a little quiet here in the last year, in large part because of our S-1 process," explained Gustafson, adding that the vendor is still in the throes its IPO effort.

"We're absolutely in registration, we're proceeding down the path to IPO," he said, explaining that the firm is currently filing the third amendment to its S-1. "Make no mistake, we're on the path and executing well -- as publicly stated, two quarters ago our run rate on a go-forward basis was over $60 million."

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