EMC To Acquire Secret Start-Up DSSD

EMC Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held DSSD, Inc.

Menlo Park-based DSSD is the developer of a new rack-scale flash storage architecture for I/O-intensive in-memory databases and big data workloads like SAP HANA and Hadoop.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014, subject to customary closing conditions.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

The transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2014 fiscal year.

DSSD will operate as a standalone unit within EMC’s emerging technology products division reporting to Chirantan C.J. Desai. DSSD president and CEO Bill Moore, formerly Sun Microsystems‘ chief storage engineer, ZFS co-lead and 3Par’s first employee, will lead the DSSD business within EMC. Andy Bechtolsheim, who is also chairman and chief development officer of Arista Networks, and formerly a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, will serve as DSSD’s strategic advisor.

Cracking the Code
As customers take advantage of the mega trends of social, mobile, cloud and big data, it will become critical to store and analyze the vast amounts of data that do not fit into main memory. Having assembled accomplished systems and storage engineering teams in Silicon Valley, DSSD has cracked the code on this dilemma.

Andy Bechtolsheim said: “The prospects of what EMC and DSSD can achieve together are truly remarkable. We ventured out to create a new storage tier for transactional and big data applications that have the highest performance I/O requirements. Working together with EMC, DSSD will deliver a new type of storage system with game-changing latency, IO/s and bandwidth characteristics while offering the operational efficiency of shared storage.”

David Goulden, CEO of EMC information infrastructure, said: “EMC established a relationship with DSSD more than a year ago. EMC led the Series A investment in DSSD and has remained an active development partner. We’re now thrilled to be joining forces with Andy, Bill and the entire DSSD team. While flash stands among IT’s most disruptive technologies, its impact and opportunity will become even more pronounced as customers enter the third platform of IT. Complementary to our market-leading all-flash and hybrid storage portfolio, DSSD will unlock an abundance of new possibilities for customers as they build out their infrastructures to support the emerging tier of next-generation in-memory and big data workloads.”

Products based on the new DSSD rack-scale flash storage architecture are expected to be available in 2015 and will be optimized for:  

• In-memory databases (e.g. SAP HANA, GemFire, etc.)
• Real-time analytics (e.g. risk management, fraud detection, high-frequency applications, Pivotal HD, etc.)
• High-performance applications used by research and government agencies (e.g. genomics, facial recognition, climate analysis, etc.)

Customers desiring a platform capable of delivering unprecedented performance for I/O intensive big data and in-memory applications like SAP HANA and Hadoop will choose DSSD rack-scale flash storage as the fastest tier in their multi-tier storage architecture.

EMC Flash Leadership
DSSD will complement EMC’s flash-based systems and software portfolio which began with EMC’s early entry into flash storage in 2008 when it became the first to integrate flash drives into enterprise storage arrays. In the first quarter of 2014 alone, EMC sold more than 17PB of flash capacity, which was up over 70% over the first quarter of 2013. After less than two months of availability in the fourth quarter of 2013, EMC XtremIO catapulted to a market-leading position, surpassing every other all-flash array. More than 70% of all VMAX and VNX2 systems now ship with flash capacity. With this portfolio of offerings to accommodate the variety of applications for flash, including EMC’s automated flash tiering software, EMC stands as the industry leader in enterprise flash storage.