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Cloud storage and data management firm NetApp has announced the acquisition of all-flash storage system provider SolidFire for $870 million (£586m) in cash.
The all-flash offering across three key market segments – traditional enterprise infrastructure buyers, application owners and next-generation infrastructure buyers – is a key reason for the purchase, NetApp argues.
“This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centres,” said NetApp CEO George Kurian. “We look forward to extending NetApp’s flash leadership with the SolidFire team, products and partner ecosystem, and to accelerating flash adoption through NetApp’s large partner and customer base.”
On the other side, SolidFire CEO and founder Dave Wright argues the acquisition represents a “tremendous opportunity to double down on our mission”, while noting that putting all-flash storage as a single market “obscures the true landscape of the data centre today.”
“All primary storage is moving to flash – fast,” he wrote in a company blog post. “The all-flash array market is not a sign of a niche market – it is displacing spinning disk at an exponential rate, with no sign of slowing down.
“There is no doubt that the IT industry is in the midst of a transformation the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades,” he added. “Customers navigating this transformation need vendors with solutions that span the full range of data centre environments and application use cases.”
In October last year, SolidFire was slurping up series D funding of $82m, bringing the overall capital raised to $150m. Jay Prassl, SolidFire VP marketing, explained to this publication at the time that the Colorado-based firm did not want to be in the position of being “forced to go public”, citing the case of Violin Memory and its less-than-stellar IPO in 2013.
Not everyone has the same opinion of the deal, however. Even though fellow enterprise flash storage provider Pure Storage went public in October – and Wright tweeted congratulations to his ‘friends’ at the company – the Mountain View firm decided to stick the knife in.
“This acquisition shows very clearly that NetApp is still scrambling to piece together a viable flash strategy,” Pure VP products Matt Kixmoeller wrote. He added: “Although we hold the folks at SolidFire in very high regard, we are confident our technology trumps. Our product lead will only grow at SolidFire is slowed down by the coming years of integration, in-fighting, and confusion that come via acquisition.”
This reporter is reminded of January 2014 when enterprise mobility management provider AirWatch was acquired by VMware. Citrix, a rival of VMware’s on desktop virtualisation and end user computing (EUC) among others, issued a blog in response describing the latter’s vision for EUC as “laughable on many counts.” The post was later pulled.
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of NetApp’s 2016 fiscal year, with Wright leading the SolidFire product line within NetApp’s product operations.