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BlueArc Moves to Head of the Class In Higher Education Market

SAN JOSE, Calif. - December 16th, 2003

BlueArc Corporation, a leader in high performance, highly scalable network storage, announced today that Columbia University, Princeton University's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior and Stanford University School of Medicine selected the SiliconServer to power file serving and research applications that require the storage and manipulation of high volumes of data. With these new wins, BlueArc continues its momentum in the education market, growing its foothold by more than 300 percent over the last 12 months.

Researchers at Colum bia, Princeton and Stanford are deploying BlueArc systems to integrate UNIX and Windows platforms, enabling them to use a single, high-performance centralized file system. IT teams and researchers at each of the universities will use the SiliconServer to meet an exponential growth in their storage requirements, fuelled by rapidly expanding student data and memory-intensive files such as MRI images, patient scans and protein structure research.

"At Columbia University, our storage needs grow from day to day, and the BlueArc solution really allows us to do more and store more data, which is critical for genome research," said Megan Restuccia, program manager for the Center for Computational Biology and Biochemistry at Columbia University. "We chose BlueArc because it provided the scalability and reliability we needed."

BlueArc SiliconServers simplify system administration by enabling users to utilize and access a shared central pool of storage. Because BlueArc's storage products map security across UNIX and Windows effortlessly, users of both platforms are given equal access rights and the ability to view storage as if it were on local disk native to their environments, without compatibility issues. As a result, customers can achieve the optimal blend of performance, capacity and cost without having to acquire and maintain multiple storage systems.

"With the amount of data we compile and analyze at the center, it would be a nightmare to have two copies of every file stored on various clusters throughout our network," said Randee Tengi, system administrator for the Princeton Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior. "We were looking for a clean and simple implementation, which made the BlueArc appliance ideal for our environment."

Columbia, the Princeton research center and Stanford are the latest universities to join BlueArc's education practice, which was established in February 2003 to meet the specialized needs of high performance computing environments at higher education institutions. BlueArc already works with leading universities including University of California at Santa Cruz, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pennsylvania State University, Rice University and Southern Adventist University.

"Similar to the IT community, higher education institutions are trying to do more with less resources, while at the same time managing data volumes that grow exponentially each year," said Chuck Joseph, executive vice president of marketing and business development for BlueArc. "BlueArc is committed to providing universities with the products and services they need to lower administration costs and reduce the complexities of storage management in high-end research applications."

About BlueArc Corporation

BlueArc® Corporation changes the economics of network storage by helping customers manage more information with less effort. BlueArc's SiliconServer storage systems enable organizations to maximize performance and reduce operating costs through the movement of software functions into programmable hardware. Since 1998, BlueArc has provided scalable and reliable products, services and solutions to help enterprises achieve unmatched productivity and profitability from their data. The company's headquarters are in San Jose, California with UK operations based in Bracknell, England. More information on BlueArc is available on the Internet at www.bluearc.com.