NetApp announce SolidFire acquisition

March 8, 2016

It’s no secret that NetApp’s journey to buy SolidFire has been a turbulent one. Despite initial rumours beginning late last year the acquisition wasn’t officially announced until early February. Now that the transaction excitement has died down, we take a look at what it really means for the industry and both current & future customers.

In a podcast early last year NetApp’s CEO George Kurian admitted that NetApp’s current All-Flash array offering simply does not meet the needs to the market quick enough and as market leaders such as IBM and EMC developed their flash offering 2 years previous, the acquisition makes perfect sense for NetApp.

Most people in the industry will be aware of who SolidFire are but those that aren’t, they are an American All-Flash storage company. Despite being just 6 years old, they have been Gartner’s highest rated solid-state array for overall use for the past 2 years. SolidFire’s architectural design has gained a lot of positive attention over the years, mainly for managing to create cost efficient simple solutions out of complex problems.

SolidFire holds a unique position in a very competitive market as its AFA solution was designed with cloud providers in mind, therefore it comes as no surprise that it has recently been named the All-Flash system product of the year by Storage Magazine.

It’s no secret that cloud-style service provision is growing inside enterprises and flash arrays are the primary data storage of the future. Current and future customers of NetApp can now take advantage of utilising a leader in the cloud community that have extensive integrated storage management capabilities with OpenStack, VMware and many other cloud frameworks.

Furthermore for enterprises that are looking to transform their datacentres to support private cloud infrastructures, the storage control plane within SolidFire’s technology is one of the greatest benefits. The NetApp & SolidFire acquisition also allows customers to solve challenges around resource allocation, simplified management and application predictability at scale.

For the meantime SolidFire is set to run as an independent business unit within NetApp but it has already been stated that over time its products will be incorporate into NetApp’s data fabric strategy. When it is incorporated customers will be set to experience seamless data management across flash, disk and cloud resources.

It goes without saying NetApp are now in an extremely strong position with their new flash offering and the benefits for customers are significant.

If you’d like to know more about the acquisition benefits for your organisation you can contact one of our NetApp specialists below:

Get In Touch

Contact Q Associates today if you have any questions or would like to discuss your IT requirements in more detail. Tel: 01635 248181 Email: Info@qassociates.co.uk