SGI gets OEM on BlueArc's Mercury

Selling into HPC and federal markets

SGI is OEM'ing rebranded BlueArc NAS products in its InfiniteStorage line.

SGI is the rebranded Rackable, which bought the failing and bankrupt Silicon Graphics Inc in May.

It's a good win for BlueArc which also has Hitachi Data Systems OEM'ing the Mercury network-attached storage (NAS) products, which were announced in July.

The Mercury 50 is presented by SGI as the InfiniteStorage NAS 50, and the Mercury 100 becomes the InfiniteStorage NAS 100, meaning the branding people didn't have to do a great deal of work.

BlueArc's Mercury channel is expected to widen as a consequence and include more high-performance computing (HPC) and US federal customers since SGI has a good reach into both marketplaces.

BlueArc and SGI have signed a strategic OEM agreement which probably means that SGI will take other BlueArc products if BlueArc makes them available. The two companies will collaborate "to provide tighter integration between SGI InfiniteStorage platforms and Mercury in future releases".

Will SGI take BlueArc's larger scale Titan products? Cray announced a deal with BlueArc to resell or OEM it in 2007 so it might become a possibility. However, SGI and Cray compete, so BlueArc might want to avoid channel competition.

Mercury is available immediately for pre-order and will begin shipping in December as part of the SGI InfiniteStorage NAS family through SGI and SGI authorised resellers worldwide. ®