NetApp to acquire data centre flash firm SolidFire for $870m

NetApp is acquiring SolidFire for $870 million in cash. Founded in 2010, SolidFire is a leader in all-flash storage systems built for data centres.

“This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centres,” said George Kurian (pictured), chief executive officer of NetApp.

“SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data centre operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications.”

With SolidFire, said NetApp, it 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 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 low-latency performance, and for the “next-generation infrastructure buyer”, SolidFire’s distributed, self-healing, webscale architecture delivers “seamless scalability, white box economics and radically simple management”, said NetApp.

SolidFire is an active participant in the cloud community with extensive integrated storage management capabilities using OpenStack, VMware and other cloud frameworks.

Dave Wright, chief executive officer at SolidFire, said: “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, said NetApp, 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, Dave Wright will lead the SolidFire product line within NetApp’s product operations.

@AntonySavvas