Solution delivers unrivaled data management, scale and performance

to redefine the economics of storage

BlueArc Corporation today introduced the BlueArc Mercury 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™, 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.”

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.”