Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) today announced a milestone in its strategy to give its customers access to all data, content and information with the acquisition of BlueArc Corporation. Building upon a 5 year OEM partnership, Hitachi Data Systems completed the acquisition of all outstanding shares of BlueArc in an all cash transaction. Hitachi did not reveal the cost of the acquisition, but Japan's Asahi newspaper said it was about $500-600 million.

IDC predicts that by 2014 more than 83 percent of enterprise storage system capacity will be shipped for file-based data, taking the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for file serving storage capacity to 2.5 times the CAGR for block storage capacity. With this acquisition, Hitachi Data Systems is making a significant move to address the fastest growing segment of the storage market.

BlueArc has been delivering high-performance enterprise NAS solutions to markets such as health and life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications, energy and e-discovery - where digital content and unstructured (file-based) data is growing at exponential rates. These industries are also faced with the challenges of "big data" - data sets so large that they become difficult to store, search, access, share and analyze.

"Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc will give customers the unmatched combination of world renowned reliability and quality with the industry leading performance and scalability required to handle the growth in big data and create information centers," the companies said in a statement.