December wraps up 2015’s busy season of digital storage acquisitions that included Dell’s acquisition of EMC and Western Digital’s acquisition of SanDisk, in addition to many smaller acquisitions. This month saw an announcement by NetApp and Carbonite. In addition Nutanix has filed for a $200 IPO. Let’s look at the detail on these deals.
NetApp said that it is acquiring solid state array manufacturer SolidFire for $870 M in cash. The move comes as NetApp seeks to bolster its position in the all flash market. NetApp says that with this acquisition it will have all-flash offerings that address the three biggest all-flash market segments. The NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) product delivers performance features across flash, disk and cloud resources. For individual applications the NetApp EF series offers world-class SPC-a benchmarks with low latency and high reliability. For next generation infrastructure customer SolidFire distributed self-healing webscale architecture provides scalability with white box economics and simple storage management. SolidFire is active participant in the cloud storage community working with integrated storage management with OpenStack, VMware and other cloud frameworks.
Carbonite bought Seagate Technology’s EVault business for $14 M. Seagate acquired EVault in December 2006 for $185 M. EVault has been Seagate’s business continuity and disaster recovery division. Carbonite plans to add several EVault solutions to its own portfolio, particularly in the SMB market, which the company estimates is worth more than $40 B worldwide. The services that Carbonite will use include EVault Cloud Backup and Recovery, the EVault Backup and Recovery Appliance and the Evault Cloud Resiliency Services that offers failover in the cloud.
Nutanix is one of what financial analysts call a unicorn, a startup valued at more than $1 B. It is a hyperconverged appliance vendor offering its Xtreme Computing Platform that delivers enterprise compute and storage on commodity computing servers running a standard hypervisor and the Nutanix Operating System. Each server contains processors, volatile memory, SSDs and HDDs. When these servers are added to a cluster these server nodes aggregate storage resources into a single storage pool. The release didn’t set a date for the IPO or the number of outstanding shares.
2015 has certainly been a busy season for digital storage mergers with many stocks having low valuation at mid-year, low interest rates and many companies seeking to position themselves for dynamic changes in the years ahead. Flash memory, cloud storage and storage management have been the big drivers for this dynamic market. It will be interesting to see if 2016 will continue the merger and acquisition trend
