HP Acquires Ibrix

HP and IBRIX announced a definitive agreement for HP to acquire IBRIX, provider of enterprise-class file serving software that includes data protection, high-availability features and data management services for extreme scale-out, cloud and high-performance computing deployments.

Customers with large-scale, data-intensive application environments find that storage performance often becomes a bottleneck for their workflows. IBRIX’s solutions allow enterprises to easily and cost-effectively store massive amounts of user-generated data.

With scalability to tens of petabytes, customers can gain control of exploding data growth and address application performance challenges in the most demanding environments. The advanced data management capability of IBRIX’s Fusion software suite also allows customers to seamlessly add capacity as their data or performance needs grow.

Founded in 2000, and an HP partner for three years, IBRIX is privately held and headquartered in Billerica, Mass. It has 53 employees and more than 175 enterprise customers spanning the communications, media, entertainment, Internet, oil and gas, healthcare, life sciences, and financial services markets. The value of the transaction is not disclosed.

Adding IBRIX’s software to HP’s portfolio further solidifies the company’s leadership in the emerging market of scale-out and high-performance computing storage, cloud storage, and fixed content archiving. This market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent per year, which is faster than both the network-attached storage and total external storage markets.

“Customers need highly scalable storage solutions that efficiently and cost-effectively manage massive amounts of information,” said Jeff Hausman, vice president of Unified Storage, StorageWorks Division, HP. “This acquisition expands our portfolio to better support the needs of this market segment. In addition, IBRIX’s highly scalable software leverages industry-standard hardware allowing customers to fully maximize their existing investments.”

IBRIX’s software is currently available with HP StorageWorks storage area networks (SANs), HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem, and HP ProCurve Ethernet switches and management software. The combination of IBRIX’s storage software with HP’s business technology portfolio offers customers a full suite of products and services from design, transformation and management of corporate data centers to the most extreme scale-out environments.

“Joining forces with HP is a natural fit for our customers, resulting in an enhanced storage solution that scales to meet their data growth,” said Milan Shetti, chief executive officer, IBRIX. “The unique combination of IBRIX’s file serving solutions with HP’s portfolio of products and services enables customers to lower the cost of scale-out architectures while easing the process of storing, accessing and moving critical data.”

The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to be completed within the next 30 days. Following completion, the business will be integrated into the StorageWorks division in HP’s Technology Solutions Group.