Storage upstart snaps at old guard's heels

Rather unsurprisingly, the industry giants have hit back at the latest addition to this increasingly crowded market, saying users would be 'foolish' to rely on untested technology.

Bluearc, which was launched late yesterday, has claimed that rivals EMC and NetApps are out of date and slow and slammed their 'cumbersome network performance'.

Bluearc has made a range of extravagant claims, including a statement that its network attached storage (NAS) product, the Si7500, will fetch data 10 times faster than its competitors' products, while its specialised server can handle 100 times as many simultaneous connections and manage 200TB of data - 30 times more than the industry standard.

Kevin Robinson, UK MD of Bluearc, said the company has rebuilt its storage server architecture and based it on networking technologies.

Robinson told silicon.com: "Our rivals are still working on the old-fashioned PC-based architecture which causes major problems. We have applied the same technology which is used in network architecture to rebuild our NAS servers to improve the performance."

Bluearc's competitors were quick to hit back. Tim Pitcher, UK MD of NetApps, said Bluearc is focusing too much on the performance issue.

"No company in their right mind would want to rely on Bluearc's technology. They have no disaster recovery, no database support and they lack publicly approved benchmarks. Successful storage operation is not about the data's fast movement at the centre of the network but also at the periphery of it," he said.

A spokesman for EMC said Bluearc's technology has not been through enough tests to back up the company's claims.

"A user would be foolish to rely on unproven technology in the current economic climate," he said.

Claus Egge, analyst at IDC, said Bluearc is entering an increasingly crowded marketplace with few collaborators.

He added: "Because the NAS space has become very crowded, there is a need for aggressive competition. But they should look into channel partnering because selling directly to corporations will be hard for them."