Overview
Earlier this month, BlueArc launched the first ever expansion to its product line: a midrange box it calls Mercury. Mercury is based on the same hardware-accelerated file system technology (BlueArc’s SiliconFS) as its high end Titan brethren, but the packaging has been changed to strip out cost and better address midrange and corporate IT users. BlueArc’s original Titan product is a scale-out IP storage system designed to serve throughput-intensive high-end unstructured data requirements. It has seen a lot of success in verticals with massive throughput requirements such as media and entertainment, HPC, genetic research and modeling, oil and gas, and anything that leverages geographic imaging systems (GIS). Titan is one of the few scale-out NAS systems on the market with a well rounded set of enterprise-class features. It is also resold by HDS.
With Mercury, BlueArc is introducing new hardware and “right sizing” its technology to serve midrange needs. BlueArc is calling the new Mercury platform a “fixed” architecture which cannot be upgraded in the field, versus Titan with its modular architecture and field upgradability. In addition these differences, Mercury tops out at 2 PB, versus 4 PB for Titan.
What it Means
BlueArc’s Titan product has seen success thanks to its capability to handle large concurrent streams of data without significant performance impact. Several market niches, such as those listed previously, really need the levels of large file performance Titan provides. Titan is a big-iron product, with a price tag to match. But if users need that level of performance and scalability, they need it. And since there are not many storage vendors that can meet their performance needs, they have been willing to pay the price.BlueArc realized that there is a limited market for the big-iron Titan, which in turn limits its opportunity to leverage its IP to meet enterprise file serving requirements. With that in mind, the hardware-accelerated file system Titan employs, SiliconFS, has been fully ported to Mercury. Unlike some competitors in this space, the hardware-assisted SiliconFS is capable of sustained performance for both large sequential and IOPS-intensive environments. Mercury strips out some of the hardware costs by capping scalability and taking out field upgradability, so you won’t see Mercury positioned for the big GIS and media opportunities, but the Mercury hardware architecture is much better suited for corporate IT environments. This is not to say users won’t want to look at Titan for Tier 1 NAS—the product is certainly a viable data center solution. But the big-iron size and cost is an inhibitor for Titan adoption in the enterprise.
Mercury opens new markets for BlueArc. Even in environments currently (and happily) using Titan, it was typically deployed by line-of-business, not corporate IT. Because of the size and expense of Titan, corporate IT had to source NAS elsewhere. Now, BlueArc can go to its install base and leverage its LOB partnerships to get into the corporate IT groups. Additionally, BlueArc is HDS’ OEM NAS supplier. HDS is planning to resell Mercury, so BlueArc should significantly benefit from HDS’s data center relationships. And HDS gets a much more competitive product to bring forth in deals versus NetApp and EMC Celerra.
BlueArc’s To-Do List
BlueArc should expect some degree of cannibalization of the Titan business by the Mercury line. It has a direct sales force, which will continue to sell Titan, and is building out channel programs and aggressively recruiting new channel partners as a route to market for Mercury. BlueArc is “messaging-challenged” and has a hard time selling value—it’s gotten by on a technical sell to people that really, really need a solution like Titan to get their jobs done. It remains to be seen if BlueArc can build out its channel partnerships and provide the tools to help them sell to IT. The product is technically solid and feature rich and the market is ripe for this type of solution in the data center, so from here on, it is purely a messaging and field execution play.The Bottom Line
ESG research indicates that enterprise IT organizations are interested in deploying scale-out NAS solutions thanks to the operational advantages scale-out brings to the table, but there is not yet a clear market leader. Now that BlueArc has the product, it needs to execute on the sales and marketing fronts to fully take advantage of the opportunity at hand. It has a good partner in HDS, but at the end of the day, Hitachi is best known as a big-iron enterprise block storage play, so HDS will need to ramp up its messaging on the NAS and iSCSI storage fronts as well.Scale-out NAS is where all the buzz is—recent acquisitions, like HP’s IBRIX and LSI’s ONStor, have shined a spotlight on this segment. The segment will get more competitive when NetApp rolls out ONTAP 8, which is incorporated with scale-out GX technology. There is a good reason for all this attention. Corporate IT is folding under the pressure of the amount of unstructured data to be stored and managed, and is turning to scale-out systems to ease the burden. Scale-out systems can scale to very high capacity (multi-PB) and still maintain a single system image—typically resulting in much better storage utilization, smaller footprint, faster time-to-provision, and easier overall management. That all adds up to lower operating costs.[1] In a tough economic environment, reducing operational costs is a big purchasing driver: recent ESG research shows that the ability to reduce operating expenses is almost twice as influential in buying decisions as a reduction in capital expense.[2]
The Mercury project may very well be a make or break for project BlueArc. Titan is overkill for most IT departments. The bulk of the Titan business went to business units within the verticals listed previously: those that absolutely required the throughput Titan could provide (post-production, satellite images)—and the associated fairly high price tag. Mercury expands the addressable market for BlueArc within these verticals, providing a solution with a more reasonable price tag while retaining high degrees of functionality and scalability.
[1] For more info, see ESG Report, Scale-Out NAS: Driving Value for Rapidly Growing File-based Storage Environments, January 2009.
[2] Source: ESG Research Report, 2009 Data Center Spending Intentions Survey, March 2009.
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