Less than a year after announcing a partnership with Archivas, Hitachi Data Systems is acquiring the archiving startup (see HDS Makes a Case for CAS).
Archivas bills itself as “the open alternative” to EMC’s Centera CAS platform, according to Archivas CEO Gary Voight.
Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Tony Asaro said the deal moves HDS into a “great market untapped by Hitachi in any real way. … It’s a great step in the right direction.”
Together, the two companies have developed the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, an active archive solution that address digital preservation, compliance and discovery for unstructured data while scaling to 2.5 petabytes.
“We are leveraging the maturity of data management in database environments to unstructured data through a common storage platform with best-in-class content capabilities,” said Jack Domme, HDS’ executive vice president of Global Solutions Strategy and Development. “We have enabled our customers to search, manage and archive unstructured data across heterogeneous content management systems using the same infrastructure and processes that govern their data centers today.”
Hitachi rarely makes acquisitions, preferring partnerships, but Domme said Archivas offered the company an opportunity to move into management of unstructured data, which comprises 80% of data. He also sought to reassure current partners, saying the technology is “very complementary to our content solutions partners.”
HDS says the Hitachi Content Archive Platform ensures secure archival-quality retention, preservation and verifiable destruction of content under common and unified archive services such as centralized search, policy-based retention, authentication and protection. It offers native support of protocols such as CIFS, NFS and HTTP.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but HDS is believed to have paid about $100 million for Archivas, which raised $28 million in funding.