Contact: Tim Stammers, Tejas Venkatesh
Following hard on the heels of its pickup of flash hardware vendor sTec, disk drive giant Western Digital has announced the purchase of flash software specialist VeloBit. Like sTec, VeloBit will become part of Western Digital’s wholly owned disk drive subsidiary Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST). VeloBit’s software is complementary to flash drives sold by HGST and sTec, and the acquisition underlines Western Digital’s ambitions in the flash market.
VeloBit sells software that creates caches of hot or frequently demanded data in flash memory installed in servers, as well as in server DRAM. The market for such caching software is becoming crowded and competitive, but is still only nascent. In March, the three-year-old startup declared that its software had been installed on more than 500 servers worldwide. VeloBit raised $5.5m in total funding from Longworth Venture Partners, Fairhaven Capital Partners and undisclosed angel investors.
Caching software boosts the performance jolt achieved by installing flash drives in servers, and its current principal applications are VDI and performance-sensitive databases, as well as server virtualization. For the latter, the software can increase the number of virtual servers or VMs that can be hosted by a single physical server. As a result, caching software is very complementary to server-installed flash drives and PCIe cards – including those already sold by Western Digital’s HGST subsidiary, and by sTec.
Although sTec also sells caching software, Western Digital clearly sees extra value in VeloBit’s software, which incorporates what VeloBit claims is an unusually efficient way of predicting or identifying hot data. Wells Fargo advised VeloBit on its sale. Interestingly, Wells Fargo was on Western Digital’s side when the company acquired sTec three weeks ago.
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