Is this an interesting development? Definitely. But a breakthrough? Not really.
BlueArc claims it now has the industry's first NAS storage systems that allow customers to mix and match ATA and Fibre Channel drives. However, its two main rivals -- EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) -- as well as Spinnaker Networks Inc. and several other vendors, have already been aggressively tapping this trend over the past year (see Spinnaker Plops In ATA, EMC Sells Petabyte of Centera, StorageTek Puts Backups on Auto, StorageTek to Punch Into Disk Backup, Is EMC's Centera Getting Traction?, EMC Has Eyes for Huge Archives, and NetApp's Backup Plan).
But Jeff Allen, senior VP of marketing at BlueArc, insists that its "multitiered" storage provides greater granularity and functionality, at lower pricing, than any of its competitors. BlueArc systems with ATA drives will cost around $40,000 for 1 Tbyte and $100,000 for 10 Tbytes, he says.
By comparison, EMC's Centera, a high-end system that's purpose-built for archiving fixed content, starts at $148,000 for 8 Tbytes. NetApp's NearStore ATA-based systems start at 12 Tbytes; the company says these systems now are priced around 1 cent per Mbyte. Neither of those systems allows both ATA and FC drives in the same system. EMC has also started offering ATA drives for its Clariion family of SAN storage arrays -- which do allow a combination of FC and ATA drives behind the same controller -- priced at $171,000 for 10 Tbytes (see EMC Backs Clariion Into ATA).
While it's no jaw-dropping feat of engineering, the fact that BlueArc is delivering ATA drives shows that it's able to keep pace with shifting market dynamics. And the five-year-old company is continuing to grow its headcount, another good sign that it's finding success. Currently it's at around 200 employees, up from 160 in September 2002; most of the new hires are salespeople or field engineers. To date, the company says it has shipped 200 systems to around 50 customers.
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