NetApp Buys Flash Storage Firm SolidFire For £587m

NetApp is buying flash data centre storage firm SolidFire for $870 million, claiming the deal will allow it to provide customers with the benefits that cloud providers enjoy for their own data centres.

SolidFire was founded in 2010 with a view to offering scalable storage for data centres and is involved with OpenStack, VMWare and other cloud initiatives.

NetApp SolidFire deal

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of the financial year and will eventually see SolidFire’s portfolio integrated with that of NetApp.

This, NetApp says, will allow it to target the three largest all-flash array market sectors – enterprise infrastructure, application owners and next generation infrastructure – and allow customers to manage data across disk, flash and cloud.

“SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data centre operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications,” said George Kurian, NetApp CEO. “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.”

“Both SolidFire and NetApp have deep technical, customer-centric cultures, which are focused on delivering innovations that give customers a competitive advantage,” said Dave Wright, SolidFire CEO, who will lead the SolidFire product line within NetApp when the takeover is completed. “We look forward to enhancing NetApp’s position within the all-flash array market while helping NetApp and SolidFire customers and partners succeed.”

Another significant takeover occurring in the storage market is Dell’s blockbuster £44 billion acquisition of EMC, which will also see the Texas firm get hold of virtualisation giant VMWare.

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