Tomorrow, BlueArc will open up a new front in their battle with the rest of the NAS vendors by introducing the Mercury 50 NAS head. This product is slated to address the more mid-range enterprise market that historically shunned the relatively higher priced Titan series.
Mercury 50 is only the first product in this series and other products to be released in the future will help fill out the top end of this series. Priced similar to the NetApp 3140 this product has all the support of standard BlueArc file system while only limiting the Max storage capacity to 1PB. Its NFS throughput is a little better than half the current Titan 3100.
Mercury 50 will eventually be offered by BlueArc’s OEM partner HDS. However, immediately the Mercury 50 will be sold by the BlueArc’s direct sales force as well as many new channel partners that BlueArc has acquired over this past year.
This marks a departure for BlueArc into the more mainstream enterprise storage space. Historically, BlueArc has been successful in the high performance market but the real volumes and commensurate revenue are in the standard enterprise space. The problem in the past has been the high price of the BlueArc Titan systems but now with Mercury this should no longer be an issue.
That being said, the competition is much more intense as you move down market. EMC and NetApp will not stand still while their market share is eroded. And both of these company’s have the wherewithal to compete on performance, pricing and features.
Exciting times ahead for the NAS users out there.
