Hitachi acquires US-based network storage company BlueArc Corp

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a subsidiary of Japanese major Hitachi Ltd, today said that it has acquired California-based network storage company BlueArc Corp in an all-cash transaction.

Hitachi did not reveal the financial terms of the transaction, but Japan's Asahi newspaper said that deal was for about $500-$600 million.

BlueArc has been associated with Hitachi Data as an OEM vendor since November 2006, for the Japanese company's NAS Platform.

It delivers highly scalable, high performance file storage to customers across a broad range of markets and is tightly focused on solving the challenges faced by unstructured data at scale. Its products are suited to customers seeking scalable solutions to the rapid growth of unstructured data whether that growth is taking place in their enterprise data center, their high-performance computing environment or any place in between.

With almost 1,000 customers worldwide, spanning markets such as media, life sciences, energy, hosted services and a rapidly increasing footprint in the virtualisation-over-NFS storage market, BlueArc is one of the top vendors in the Gartner 2011 NAS Magic Quadrant's "Visionaries" quadrant 2.

Hitachi's acquisition comes after BlueArc, which has been posting losses for the past eight years, filed for an IPO in June in order to raise $100 million.