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This time, it’s official.
EMC today revealed that it is indeed acquiring ScaleIO, a software startup with offices in Palo Alto Calif. and Israel. ScaleIO specializes in storage software, called Elastic Converged Storage (ECS), that pools server-side storage, namely solid-state drives (SSDs), flash PCIe caching cards and hard drives and presents, and presents it as a virtual SAN to the network.
ScaleIO emerged from stealth late last year and announced that it had attracted $12 million in venture funding. In press remarks at the time, ScaleIO CEO Boaz Palgi said “ECS makes storage as inconspicuous as CPU and RAM. Running seamlessly alongside business applications, ECS enables data centers to be built wall to wall from commodity servers only.”
News of the buy first started circulating in June. Reports pegged the deal’s value between $200 million and $300 million. The companies have not officially disclosed financial terms behind the all-cash transaction, however.
“ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Product Division,” announced EMC in a statement. Its ECS software will form an “integral part” of XtremSW, EMC’s line of flash caching products, the company said.
The startup’s software defined storage approach helps accelerate the storage giant’s efforts to lead the enterprise flash storage race. “Flash now permeates every layer of IT—in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. Enterprise workloads are diverse in nature, and EMC is committed to offering our customers and partners choice in their Flash deployments,” said EMC COO David Goulden in a statement.
“ScaleIO is a natural extension to our best-of-breed portfolio. It strengthens our product capabilities in the area of server-side storage and brings a world class team that will undoubtedly enable us to innovate more quickly in the future,” added Goulden.
EMC Flash Products senior vice president Zahid Hussain detailed in a blog post some of the use cases that ScaleIO’s software enables.
“With ECS as the foundation, EMC can build out a scale-out server stack for a wide variety of use cases like VDI, virtualization, databases, and HPC, in several target markets. For example, we can provide elastic, dynamic and flexible Flash storage to service provider partners who provide public cloud to their customers,” wrote Hussain.
Hussain also hinted that in the future, prospering in the fast-growing enterprise flash storage market will be determined by coders. “Flash will continue to be all about the software and we will continue our work to fulfill our vision through both organic innovation, and the integration of ScaleIO technology,” he stated.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
