EMC Buys Flash Storage Maker XtremIO

EMC, in a not-very-well-kept "secret" for the last few weeks, announced May 10 that it is acquiring startup XtremIO, a flash-based storage maker that hasn't even issued its products for general availability yet.

As is customary for its smaller acquisitions, EMC did not reveal the transaction terms. However, industry analysts contacted by eWEEK--who have predicted this move for weeks--are pretty sure that the selling price was in the neighborhood of $425 million.

San Jose, Calif.-based XtremIO, still in beta trials with customers, is among the new generation of storage makers that has optimized solid-state NAND flash disks for the daily pounding of enterprise IT systems.

EMC was not specific about how XtremIO's secret sauce will work its way into the company's already loaded NAND flash product catalog, saying only that "the addition of XtremIO complements the range of EMC flash-based systems." 

Like most of its competitors, XtremIO has a scale-out, all-flash clustered storage system for storing primary data from several sources that include dedicated servers, databases and virtualized environments. With workloads becoming larger by the week, faster processing is a highly sought-after commodity.

Other key players in this sector include Fusion i-o, Violin Memory, SolidFire, Kaminario and Tintri. It would be no surprise to many data storage sector observers to see one or more of these companies also be acquired in the next few weeks or months.

"EMC's purchase is a great endorsement of the flash market, but, in our opinion, this transaction is about much more than flash," Jay Prassl, Vice-President of Marketing at SolidFire, told eWEEK via email.

"Flash is not new to EMC. What is new are the architectural complexities that come with an all-flash scale-out storage system.  The use of flash at scale poses a complex problem set that is not suited to traditional storage architectures, and XtremeIO may allow them to skip an architectural redesign."