ENTERTAINMENT

BlueArc Corporation, the world leader in network storage innovation, today announced the company's recently-concluded fiscal quarter achieved new sales records for the firm, delivering year-over-year growth of nearly 100 percent. On the back of significant customer demand for the company's award-winning Titan 2000 storage systems, the company has achieved seven consecutive record quarters, including sales to more than two hundred customers in a wide variety of data-intensive industries. "BlueArc's Titan 2000 storage systems provide real, critical, benefits for customers, resulting in the company seeing significant momentum in the marketplace as customers in a wide variety of industries realize the benefits of high performance network storage without compromise," said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst of the StorageIO Group. "BlueArc's combination of a unique hardware architecture and an enterprise-class software suite is propelling the company to new heights. We expect BlueArc to continue their string of successes as customers turn to Titan 2000 to accelerate applications, reduce complexity and enable consolidation without introducing bottlenecks." Earlier in 2006, BlueArc introduced the Titan 2000 storage system family, delivering world-record performance on multiple third party benchmarks, scalability to 512 terabytes on a single node, and the introduction of a clustered namespace with the ability to span multiple Titans. The Titan 2000 series features an enterprise class software suite, including policy based data migration and replication, iSCSI, enhanced data protection, disaster recovery tools and a WORM file system, alongside a leading virtualization framework, including virtual storage pools, virtual servers, and virtual volumes. BlueArc's Titan 2200 system, ten months after its initial introduction and testing, continues to hold record results for single and dual file server configurations on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) System File Server (sfs) test for network storage server performance, with approximately 100,000 SPECsfs operations per second per server, with linear scaling cluster performance. In real-world environments, Titan 2000 delivers upwards of 300,000 operations per second, two to three times the performance of Network Appliance and EMC's high-end systems. Titan 2000 systems also feature scalable file systems of up to 256 terabytes, 16 times higher than Network Appliance and EMC, and the ability to cluster file systems in a global namespace of up to 512 terabytes, reducing the amount of time administrators spend managing data. Titan's unique capabilities have enabled customers in a host of vertical markets and the enterprise to achieve previously unattainable tasks. In 2006, BlueArc saw significant growth in the fields of higher education and research, Internet services, entertainment and the government, with the most dramatic expansion of the company's business being seen in the fields of energy exploration and electronic discovery. Some of the new customers who selected Titan 2000 include Chevron, DiscoveryWorks Legal, Document Technologies Inc., Double Negative Visual Effects, Emag Solutions, Intermap Technologies, Legis Discovery, OnSite E-Discovery, and WETA Digital. "In the demanding industry of litigation support, you need to have highly scalable storage that has tremendous throughput, so you can go through terabytes of information quickly and easily, meeting legal deadlines," said Leonard Deutchman, General Counsel and Managing Partner for Legis Discovery, an electronic discovery and computer forensics firm. "BlueArc's Titan 2000 delivers performance, throughput and scalability above anything else we could get on the market. Ultimately, our clients are interested in our doing the right job, at a reasonable cost, and completing the job as fast as possible. BlueArc accelerates our business in a way no other solution could." In 2006, as a record number of new customers have adopted Titan 2000, and the company's installed customer base continues to deliver approximately 50% of revenue, BlueArc has seen deployments on an average of more than 40 terabytes per server head, up from 25 terabytes in 2005 and 15 terabytes in 2004, as customer data growth continues to expand dramatically. The combination of increased customer adoption and demand for larger systems has resulted in BlueArc selling more petabytes of storage in 2006 than in all previous years selling, dating back to the company's first customer shipments in 2001. In 2006, the company also saw individual customers pass the petabyte mark for installed BlueArc storage, with several more seeing orders of more than 100 terabytes apiece. Additionally, the company saw dramatic expansion in global markets, including Asia, Australia, India, Africa and continental Europe, complementing the company's thriving North American business. "Customer adoption of Titan 2000 has been dramatic, as BlueArc has seen an unprecedented level of demand and sales activity worldwide, as customers recognize they can scale in performance and capacity with a platform designed for the long-term," said Mike Gustafson, president and CEO of BlueArc. "Our hardware-accelerated architecture is far beyond anything on the market today and is the driving force behind our increased customer adoption. It is exciting to announce that as we have deployed to more than 200 customers worldwide, the company has also sold more storage capacity this year than in all previous years combined." BlueArc's Titan 2000 is the world's only modular network storage product that protects customers' storage investment and scales to meet the explosive growth in enterprise data. Titan 2000 provides the best price/performance and return on investment in the storage industry and allows customers to scale a single Titan far beyond any other products available today, adapting to changing application or capacity needs, simplifying management, accelerating productivity and protecting long-term investment. "The Titan 2000 series is the standard-bearer for high performance network storage, and customers in all markets are seeing how BlueArc can accelerate their applications, reduce time to market and eliminate complexity through legacy server consolidation," said Steve Daheb, vice president of marketing for BlueArc. "Since the introduction of Titan 2000 earlier this year, newly released competitive products are still falling short. The overwhelming majority of BlueArc's revenue from new customers in 2006 is at the expense of established legacy NAS vendors, whose customers have discovered there is a better way." For more details about the SPECsfs benchmark and a current list of validated results, please visit its Web site.