NetApp, Inc. today announced it has entered into a
definitive agreement to 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."
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 6x9'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.