Western Digital to Acquire Flash Storage Systems Maker Tegile

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Western Digital announced today that the hard drive maker is acquiring flash storage specialist Tegile Systems for an undisclosed amount.

The companies expect the transaction to close soon, during the week of Sept. 4. After the deal is sealed, Western Digital will welcome Tegile’s 1,700 customers. The announcement comes months after Western Digital led a $33 million round of funding earmarked to help Tegile preserve its all-flash sales momentum.

Earlier this year, Tegile announced a 110 percent revenue growth rate for its all-flash portfolio.

“As an early partner and investor in the company, we’ve always been extremely impressed with Tegile’s ability to bring disruptive innovation to the enterprise flash storage market, all while operating on a strong business model of sustainable growth,” said Jerry Kagele, executive vice president of Sales at Western Digital in an April 11 media advisory revealing that the company had raised a total of $178 million to date.

Newark, Calif.-based Tegile emerged from stealth in 2012 with hybrid NAS and SAN arrays intended to serve as primary storage systems in the comparatively early days of flash’s takeover of the enterprise storage market. Fast forward five years, the company’s products are enabling a variety of high-performance application, analytics and storage workloads for the customers. Last month, the company was named an all-flash array visionary by Gartner for a third consecutive year.

Now, as company prepares to get folded into Western Digital, Rohit Kshetrapal, CEO and cofounder of Tegile noted that his team’s innovations will have a major impact on the data center storage ambitions of his company’s acquirer. In an Aug. 29 blog post, he claimed “Tegile’s performance storage products will be the foundation for Western Digital’s DCS [data center storage] systems business.”

For enterprise organizations seeking to bridge the seemingly disparate worlds of big data and flash-accelerated “fast data,” the fusion of Western Digital’s storage systems and Tegile’s storage technologies is a win-win, according to Narayan Venkat, CMO of Tegile.

“Big data is all about scale, whereas Fast Data is all about performance. IT infrastructure operators in today’s enterprise and cloud-scale data centers, are looking to deploy scalable storage architectures that deliver reliable persistence with high performance and optimal economics for an expanding range of big data and fast data applications,” he explained to Enterprise Storage Forum.

“The combination of Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage systems products (targeting big data) and Tegile’s IntelliFlash all-flash and hybrid systems products (targeting fast data) delivers a comprehensive data storage infrastructure that enables customers to harness the value of their data with the best economics while accelerating their business,” Venkat added.

The Western Digital-Tegile deal leaves one less independent flash storage pioneer to battle it out in the market.

In April, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced it had wrapped up its acquisition of Nimble Storage, a provider of hybrid and all-flash storage systems, for $1 billion. In late 2015, NetApp announced it was acquiring all-flash storage specialist SolidFire in a deal worth $870 million, which closed months later on Feb. 2, 2016.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez is a contributor to Datamation, eWEEK, and the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro.

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