BlueArc Storage Solution Clears Claranet's Path to New Managed Services

BlueArc® Corporation, a leader in scalable, high performance unified network storage, today announced that Claranet, a leading managed services provider in the UK and Europe, has deployed a BlueArc Titan 2000 network storage cluster. As Claranet expands its range of complex services, it is relying on BlueArc Titan technology for the industry's fastest throughput -- essential to providing consistently superior performance in Claranet's data-driven business.

Founded in 1996 with headquarters in London, Claranet provides tailor-made solutions to customers in the UK, Europe and the United States. Claranet offers businesses of all sizes a selection of networks, managed applications and hosting.

"As Claranet's portfolio of products has become ever-more sophisticated, simplifying the management of critical elements of its process, including storage, has become essential," said Matt Saunders, Systems Manager, Claranet. "We were already aware of BlueArc technology's impressive performance for other companies, and when Claranet's service expansion began to test the limits of our legacy storage systems, we saw not only the opportunity, but also the necessity of evaluating what Titan could do for us."

Claranet initiated a competitive evaluation to replace a storage infrastructure that failed to scale seamlessly. In addition, the company wanted to stem the direct and indirect expense of adding and operating additional processing power in order to accelerate its legacy system's performance. Criteria for the selection of a new storage system included high-availability and performance, with support for existing networking and server infrastructure investments. Requirements for this selection also included Fibre Channel storage disks, device performance capable of supporting customers' heavy demand for their data around the clock; and what Saunders calls "organizational compatibility" -- an agreement in which Claranet and BlueArc can work in tandem to develop optimum solutions.

Claranet executives are confident the distinctive hardware-based architecture of the Titan system can support long-term growth. They were also impressed by the BlueArc team's responsiveness and dedication to configuring a cost-effective solution. The cost savings from eliminating legacy storage maintenance contracts have financed the BlueArc Titan implementation, and expansion simply requires the addition of storage disks.

As the company grows, Claranet executives anticipate that the BlueArc Titan storage cluster will make it possible to consolidate more customers on a single platform and virtualize groups of users according to their performance requirements, as well as reduce system downtime for upgrades. The BlueArc Titan technology architecture also reduces the physical footprint of storage in the data center, helping to reduce power and cooling demands and simplify storage management.

"Our BlueArc Titan implementation is a crucial building block in our current offerings," said Saunders. "Together with the award-winning Network and Hosting services Claranet has been known for since 1996, our business now includes high-value services such as managing companies' IT infrastructure and applications. The simplified high performance storage infrastructure is key to unlocking this potential."

About BlueArc

BlueArc is a leading provider of high performance unified network storage systems to enterprise markets, as well as data intensive markets, such as electronic discovery, entertainment, federal government, higher education, Internet services, oil and gas and life sciences. Our products support both network attached storage, or NAS, and storage area network, or SAN, services on a converged network storage platform.

We enable companies to expand the ways they explore, discover, research, create, process and innovate in data-intensive environments. Our products replace complex and performance-limited products with high performance, scalable and easy to use systems capable of handling the most data intensive applications and environments. Further, we believe that our energy efficient design and our products' ability to consolidate legacy storage infrastructures, dramatically increases storage utilization rates and reduces our customers' total cost of ownership. Information about BlueArc solutions and services can be found at http://www.bluearc.com/ .

About Claranet

Claranet was established in 1996 as a dial-up Internet access provider in the UK. The company's sustained profitability has resulted in continuous reinvestment, transforming Claranet into a multi-national managed service provider.

Today Claranet provides flexible and tailored network infrastructure that performs to the requirements of its 36,000 business customers across six European countries and the US.

Claranet customers have confidence in their connectivity. They are served by experienced, innovative and dependable technicians.

Claranet commits to the highest standard of service level agreement.

URL: www.uk.clara.net