Storage Effect

Potential risk for IBM competitors currently using Diligent’s product

Byte and Switch  is referencing Israeli media reports that IBM has acquired Diligent for $200M.  The deal’s been talked about in the blogosphere, including here, for a few weeks now. 

Deduplication is an important enabling technology for the data center. Diligent, EMC’s former Israeli lab, is a dedupe leader.  It’s not clear what this will mean for IBM competitors HDS, Sun and Overland that are licensing Diligent’s technology today.

There may be a bit of scrambling as the music stops on the dedupe round of techno musical chairs.

Moshe Yanai and connection makes this intriguing

Byte and Switch says IBM is looking at acquiring Diligent, which includes what was EMC’s Israeli lab.  The interesting connection is Moshe Yanai, who engineered the recent purchase of Israeli-based XIV a few months ago.

An added incentive for IBM is that they have been relatively quiet about deduplication, which is Diligent’s forte.

Update:  Storagezilla adds some color on Diligent, EMC and IBM.

A perfect storm for IBM in the enterprise storage space? 

There are a lot of startups in the storage world with mostly excellent technology, all struggling to break out.  IBM may have scored a coup with its acquisition of XIV by providing the business scale and market reach to propel Nextra into mainstream adoption. 

IBM’s marketing plus XIV’s technology, coupled with the fact that IBM doesn’t have EMC’s Symmetrix business to cannibalize, creates a market-changing Pivotal Moment in the enterprise storage space.  If IBM can move fast, they can achieve the market success in this segment that all of those startups mostly just gret to dream about.

Read what Robin Harris has to say on this.

IBM acquires XIV: storage technology for a Web 2.0 world 

Moshe Yanai, the man who invented the Symmetrix (and therefore EMC) decades ago, has created a game-changing storage solution at XIV, his 5 year-old  startup.  IBM thinks so too, it seems. They announced today that they had acquired the company.

Enterprise Strategy Group was big on XIV even before IBM announced they would acquire them.  Who couldn’t like rebuilding a 1 TB drive in less than 30 minutes?  An innovative massively parallel storage architecture creates all kinds of rule-busting capabilities (near-infinite scalability, high performance with SATA drives) that are only available today in massive, custom-built internet data centers.