NetApp, Inc. has announced in a press release that they will be acquiring SolidFire Inc., a market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the next-generation data center, for $870 million in cash.
The acquisition will accelerate NetApp's adoption of all-flash data centers.
NetApp said that SolidFire allows them to have all-flash offerings that address each of the three largest All-Flash Array market segments.
The company gets SolidFire's distributed, self-healing, web-scale architecture that delivers seamless scalability, white box economics, and radically simple management.
SolidFire's web-scale architecture allows customers to accelerate third platform use cases and web-scale economics.
This complements NetApp's All-Flash FAS (AFF) product line, for the traditional enterprise infrastructure buyer, and NetApp's EF Series product line, for the application owner.
George Kurian, the CEO of NetApp, said that the acquisition "benefits their current and future customers."
"SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a web-scale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications," he said.
Bloomberg said that projections for the flash market keep growing as sales for the system almost reached $1.6 billion last year, two years earlier than the International Data Corporation had predicted.
SolidFire had sales of about $50 million in 2014 while NetApp had more than double that amount in the flash category.
Customers are looking into flash storage because it's faster than traditional hard drives and prices for flash are decreasing.
Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets & Co., said that flash is "one of the bright spots" the storage market.
"With EMC busy dealing with the Dell acquisition, we view this as a smart strategic acquisition that should further help its brand and expand its product wings on the flash front," he said.
NetApp said that they expect the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, to close on the company's fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2016.
