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Western Digital To Acquire Skyera, Incorporated Into HGST

Entering into all-flash subsystems

Western Digital Corp. and HGST, Inc. announced that HGST has completed an all-cash acquisition of Skyera, Inc., developer of solid-state storage systems for scale-out cloud and enterprise data centers.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Skyera will be integrated into HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp.

It will augment HGST’s existing solid-state storage capabilities and portfolio, and allow HGST to broaden its scope of innovation to capture new and growing opportunities in data center storage infrastructure. The acquisition brings engineering talent and intellectual property that will further strengthen HGST’s technical expertise and resources.

Western Digital has established a leadership position in the fastest growing areas of the storage industry,” said Steve Milligan, president and CEO, Western Digital. “The Skyera acquisition supports our strategic growth objectives and plans to deliver long-term value to customers, shareholders and employees.”
 
With a broad storage solutions portfolio, HGST is helping customers and partners build tomorrow’s IT infrastructures. From tier 0 workloads to long-term storage and active archive, HGST’s data center storage solutions help manage the enormous volume, velocity and variety of data, giving customers better efficiency and reliability for managing data through its lifecycle. HGST is developing products that address the rapidly evolving needs of cloud service providers and enterprises through the tight integration of advanced software and hardware. HGST’s innovations create more adaptive and efficient IT infrastructures that help organizations better manage data across its lifecycle to extract greater value from the information it holds.

Western Digital and Skyera have had a long-term strategic partnership. By combining Skyera’s innovative flash platform with HGST’s leading solid-state storage solutions and flash virtualization software we plan to provide breakthrough value and capabilities to help customers transform their cloud and enterprise data center infrastructure,” said Mike Cordano, president, HGST. “Flash solutions represent a large, exciting growth area for HGST and uniquely complement our existing portfolio.”

Comments

Founded in 2010 and based in San Jose, CA, Skyera, formerly StorCoud, got financial funding from at least three rounds, receiving $6 million in 2012 and $51.6 million in 2013.

There was another last round - the amount not being revealed - announced in August 2014 as well as at the same time a new CEO, Frankie Roohparvar, former COO, replacing Dr. Radoslav Danilak, co-founder and former CEO becoming CTO of the company.

Note that, among the investors into Skyera, there were Dell and ... Western Digital.

The price for the deal was not revealed but is probably in several hundreds of million of dollars.

Last May, the Californian firm announces that it grew year-over-year product and service revenue by 749% in 2013.

The start-up is offering an available second generation of its flash arrays, skyHawk FS, with 136TB of raw flash in 1U. It's an unified SAN (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) device with bandwidth speeds up to 2.4GB/s, up to 400,000 IOPS and with microsecond latencies. It incorporates the Skyera Storage Operating System (SeOS), Skyera's Life Amplification technology to extend the projected life of the flash layer "by 100 times", while proprietary RAID SE technology protects against flash chip failure within the unit for increased reliability.

At the beginning of the year, the company signed a partnership with WD and HGST enemy Seagate for using a combination of skyHawk systems, EVault cloud storage services and Xyratex ClusterStor family of storage solutions

This acquisition proves that HGST - like Seagate - wants to be an actor, not only in HDDs and SSDs, but also in subsystems, taking the risk to compete with its own OEMs and customers.

Former acquisitions of Western Digital in SSDs

Month Year Company Price* Activity of acquired firm
4 2009 SiliconSystems 65 SSDs for embedded systems
6 2013 sTec 340 SSDs, incorporated into HGST
8 2013 Velobit NA Caching software for SSD, incorporated into HGST
2013 Virident Systems 685 PCIe SSDs, incorporated into HGST

* in $ million

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