Hitachi Data Systems Acquires BlueArc

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.