NetApp To Purchase Solid State Storage Start-Up SolidFire

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NetApp, Inc. on Monday announced its intent to acquire the Boulder, Colorado based all-flash array (AFA) vendor SolidFire, for $870 million in cash.

According the to announcement, NetApp intends to incorporate SolidFire’s products into NetApp’s existing product lines. Following the close of the transaction, SolidFire CEO, Dave Wright, will lead the SolidFire product line within NetApp.

NetApp will continue to push their existing all-flash offerings to the three largest AFA market segments, with their existing lines targeting the enterprise, and SolidFire focused on next-generation cloud and “webscale” architectures.

CRN had reported earlier in the day that an announcement was coming, and in their reporting said that Cisco and Samsung had also been interested in picking up SolidFire. SolidFire had raised around $180 million in funding since it was started in 2009 and launched its first product in late 2012.

SolidFire competes in the AFA segment against other market leaders like EMC’s XtremeIO, Pure Storage and Tegile. The company’s main selling points are a robust storage quality of service (QoS) offering that allows service providers to carve up and guarantee a level of performance for customers, an application programming interface (API) that enables administrators to program against or script any functionality within the system, and a scale-out architecture that uses traditional iSCSI and Ethernet.

NetApp expects the transaction to be completed during the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, 2016.