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Western Digital Corp. has announced the acquisition of storage system performance acceleration software specialist VeloBit. Previously a privately held company, VeloBit has made a strong name for themselves with ground-breaking software technology that utilizes SSDs to create a transparent application acceleration layer to significantly improve storage system performance. VeloBit will be integrated into HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Western Digital’s wholly-owned subsidiary.
Along with the recently announced sTec acquisition, Western Digital’s HGST is moving full-steam-ahead into the burgeoning enterprise SSD market. By being able to offer both the SSD hardware and the application acceleration software, HGST will bring to the table more complete storage solutions for enterprise and data center storage customers.
VeloBit’s proven-successful SSD caching software enables significantly higher I/O (input/output) performance, dramatically reduces latency, and decreases demand on CPUs. This more efficient use of storage resources enables increased storage and virtual machine density per server. HDDs formerly required to run applications are now freed up to be used as actual storage, immediately increasing the capacity of the storage array.
Mike Cordano, president of HGST, states that “In VeloBit we saw a great team that has developed and commercialized breakthrough I/O optimization software. The acquisition of VeloBit is an important step in our strategy to develop robust software capabilities to augment our successful SSD product portfolio.”
According to Duncan McCallum, co-founder and CEO of VeloBit, “We are convinced that the best way to meet our customers’ needs is to tightly integrate storage optimization software with the hardware. In HGST we have found the ideal partner to continue to develop our ground-breaking caching, compression, and cache coherence technology. This acquisition will enable us to continue to expand the range of products and services we offer to our customers.”
VeloBit’s HyperCache was honored by Storage Magazine as a 2012 Storage Product of the Year. VeloBit has also achieved a number of competitive performance benchmarks in I/O acceleration and server density optimization. VeloBit was launched in September of 2010 by a savvy group of entrepreneurs and storage industry experts to bring to market their caching and data compression inventions. The fledgling company received funding from Fairhaven Capital and Longworth Venture Partners.
TSSDR cited VeloBit as a prime acquisition target back in September of 2012, so we are not the least bit surprised to see the company get snatched up by one of the dominant players in the storage industry. The pace of acquisition of storage software companies by storage hardware companies has definitely heated up. Do we have a bit of “storage wars” brewing?
VeloBit’s financial advisor for this transaction is Wells Fargo Securities, LLC. The Western Digital press release on the VeloBit acquisition can be viewed here.