Hitachi Data Systems announced a significant milestone in its strategy to give customers seamless access to all data, content and information with the acquisition of BlueArc Corporation, a leader in scalable, high performance network storage.
Building upon a successful 5 year OEM partnership, Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc will give customers the unmatched combination of Hitachi enterprise-class quality, reliability and support with innovative, highly scalable, high performance BlueArc network attached storage (NAS).
Hitachi Data Systems completed the acquisition of all outstanding shares of BlueArc in an all cash transaction. Wells Fargo Securities was the exclusive financial advisor to Hitachi Data Systems. BofA Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisor and Credit Suisse as a co-advisor to BlueArc for this transaction.
IDC predicts that by 2014 more than 83 % of enterprise storage system capacity will be shipped for file-based data, taking the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for file serving storage capacity to 2.5 times the CAGR for block storage capacity1.
With this acquisition, Hitachi Data Systems is making a significant move to address the fastest growing segment of the storage market. BlueArc has been successfully delivering high-performance enterprise NAS solutions to customers in a variety of markets such as health and life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications, energy and e-discovery – where digital content and unstructured (file-based) data is growing at exponential rates.
These industries are also faced with the challenges of “big data” – data sets so large that they become difficult to store, search, access, share and analyze. Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc will give customers the unmatched combination of world renowned reliability and quality with the industry leading performance and scalability required to handle the growth in big data and create information centers.