Hitachi Data Systems Acquires BlueArc
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HDS had been the largest of BlueArc's OEM customers. The two companies had been doing business together for about five years; the merger will allow completely integrated software and hardware between the two storage makers.
Hitachi Data Systems, not known for making many acquisitions,
revealed Sept. 7 that it has acquired high-performance storage system
maker BlueArc to bolster its enterprise product line.
Details and a total purchase price in the all-cash deal were not released.
HDS had been the largest of BlueArc's OEM customers. The two companies
had been doing business together for about five years; the merger will
allow completely integrated software and hardware to be produced between
the two storage makers.
Thirteen-year-old BlueArc, one of the older second-generation storage
makers, develops clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems for
storing and managing digital content and unstructured (file-based) data.
The company's products use a scalable file system that allows for
multiple storage nodes to be managed as a single pool.
As customer capacity requirements grow, new storage nodes can be added
modularly, and legacy storage systems can be incorporated into the
BlueArc namespace for better utilization of assets. BlueArc's products
are most often purchased for high-end file repositories, such as media
and entertainment, genomics, Web 2.0, e-discovery and oil and gas
exploration.
BlueArc has been increasingly positioning its branded products toward mainstream enterprise virtualization environments.
"Bringing BlueArc into the Hitachi family will enable us to better serve
customers with more tightly integrated technologies, broader
capabilities and deeper expertise globally," HDS CEO Jack Domme said.
"Our combined efforts will deliver cost-effective infrastructure cloud
and content cloud solutions that customers can take advantage of as they
look to further transform their data centers."
San Jose, Calif.-based BlueArc, which had filed the paperwork for an
initial public offering on June 24, now will forgo that option. The
company immediately becomes HDS's "big data" enterprise storage maker.
Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
