NetApp (Nasdaq: NTAP), which has a major presence in Research Triangle Park, is bolstering its arsenal in the growing flash memory market by acquiring Denver-based SolidFire. The deal is worth $870 million in cash.
SolidFire technology offers up to 1.9 petabytes of capacity.
Speculation had swirled recently about a possible SoolidFire deal with Cisco among the rumored potential buyers.
“This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centers,” said George Kurian, chief executive officer of NetApp. “SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications.
“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.”
- More coverage: News triggers wave of web headlines. Here’s a roundup.
NetApp already offers its own flash products. The deal is seen as a move to add revenue as well as technology. NetApp has not reported a sales increase for eight consecutive quarters, according to Bloomberg.
“Flash storage, while more expensive per bit than hard disks, delivers data much faster while taking up less space and power,” according to IDG. “Scale-out architectures like SolidFire’s are designed to give enterprises greater flexibility in building out data centers and ultimately lowering their costs.”
The deal was announced Monday after the markets closed. SourceFire has raised some $150 million in venture capital.
Dave Wright, the CEO of startup SourceFire, will join NetApp.
“Both SolidFire and NetApp have deep technical, customer-centric cultures, which are focused on delivering innovations that give customers a competitive advantage,” Wright said in a statement. “We look forward to enhancing NetApp’s position within the all-flash array market while helping NetApp and SolidFire customers and partners succeed.”
The buy makes senses to one analyst, noting the battle NetApp is waging with EMC (another big RTP player) and others in the storage market.
Flash is “one of the bright spots in a very dark storage market,” Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets & Co., told Bloomberg.
“With EMC busy dealing with the Dell acquisition, we view this as a smart strategic acquisition that should further help its brand and expand its product wings on the flash front.”
More details on the deal
- Read more from Bloomberg at:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technologyinvesting/netapp-acquiring-solidfire-for-dollar870-million-to-boost-flash/ar-BBnNxvI
- Read more from IDG at:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3017045/data-storage/netapp-to-buy-flash-storage-startup-solidfire-for-870m.html
Here’s the press release:
NetApp to Acquire SolidFire
Accelerates Adoption of All-Flash Data Centers
Sunnyvale, Calif. — NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SolidFire for $870 million in cash. Founded in 2010, SolidFire is a market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the next-generation data center where simple scaling, set-and-forget management, assured performance and multi-tenancy, and cloud economic models are driving new market growth.
“This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centers,” said George Kurian, chief executive officer of NetApp. “SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications. 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.”
With SolidFire, NetApp will now have all-flash offerings that address each of the three largest All-Flash Array market segments. For the traditional enterprise infrastructure buyer, the award-winning NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) product line delivers enterprise-grade features across flash, disk and cloud resources. For the application owner, the NetApp EF Series product line offers world-class SPC-1 benchmarks with consistent low-latency performance and proven 6×9’s reliability. For the next-generation infrastructure buyer, SolidFire’s distributed, self-healing, webscale architecture delivers seamless scalability, white box economics, and radically simple management. This enables customers to accelerate third platform use cases and webscale economics. SolidFire is an active leader in the cloud community with extensive integrated storage management capabilities with OpenStack, VMware, and other cloud frameworks.
“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, chief executive officer at SolidFire. “We look forward to enhancing NetApp’s position within the all-flash array market while helping NetApp and SolidFire customers and partners succeed.”
Over time, SolidFire products will be incorporated into NetApp’s data fabric strategy, delivering seamless data management across flash, disk and cloud resources. Following the close of the transaction, which is anticipated to occur in NetApp’s fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions, SolidFire CEO, Dave Wright, will lead the SolidFire product line within NetApp’s product operations.
