Netapp Acquires IOP Flash King SolidFire for $870 million

NetApp in December surprised the IT world with its announcement that it would acquire SolidFire, one of a handful of startups in the all-flash storage industry. The deal brought a legacy storage vendor — in the throes of a long transition to modernize its architecture and embrace the all-flash revolution — together with a nimble startup whose technology was designed for modern high-performance applications and hyper-scale data centers.

Just recently announced acquire SolidFire for $870 million in cash. Founded in 2010, SolidFire is a market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the next-generation data center where simple scaling, set-and-forget management, assured performance and multi-tenancy, and cloud economic models are driving new market growth.

“This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centers,” said George Kurian, chief executive officer of NetApp. “SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications. We look forward to extending NetApp’s flash leadership with the SolidFire team, products and partner ecosystem, and to accelerating flash adoption through NetApp’s large partner and customer base.”

Why did NetApp decide to acquire SolidFire given that there are so many choices in the all-flash storage market?

Caswell: NetApp has been selective in how it acquires companies and technologies. But we saw something interesting in SolidFire’s technology and in how the company was run.

From the technology side, we saw SolidFire developing technology that leads to an all-flash data center, with the ability to install and scale quickly. NetApp also valued its model of simplicity. We saw this as a way to scale our business.

SolidFire was not a profligate spender. They invested carefully in developing the company.

With SolidFire, NetApp 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 award-winning 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 world-class SPC-1 benchmarks with consistent low-latency performance and proven 6×9’s reliability. For the next-generation infrastructure buyer, SolidFire’s distributed, self-healing, webscale architecture delivers seamless scalability, white box economics, and radically simple management. This enables customers to accelerate third platform use cases and webscale economics. SolidFire is an active leader in the cloud community with extensive integrated storage management capabilities with OpenStack, VMware, and other cloud frameworks.

“Both SolidFire and NetApp have deep technical, customer-centric cultures, which are focused on delivering innovations that give customers a competitive advantage,” said Dave Wright, chief executive officer at SolidFire. “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, 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, which is anticipated to occur in NetApp’s fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions, SolidFire CEO, Dave Wright, will lead the SolidFire product line within NetApp’s product operations.

About NetApp
Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. To learn more, visit www.netapp.com.

About SolidFire
SolidFire is the market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center. SolidFire’s all-flash architecture, with volume-level Quality of Service (QoS) controls, gives customers guaranteed storage performance. To learn more, go to www.solidfire.com.