Contact: Tejas Venkatesh, Peter ffoulkes
Xyratex has announced a fairly rare deal with the acquisition of some of Oracle’s assets. Specifically, Xyratex is picking up the intellectual property related to the Lustre file system from Oracle, which the database giant itself obtained as part of its Sun Microsystems buy. Having already made significant investments in Lustre-based high-performance storage systems, the move helps Xyratex stabilize the Lustre community, and thus strengthen its product strategy.
The deal is a natural fit for Xyratex following its purchase of Lustre-based file storage management systems vendor ClusterStor in November 2010. ClusterStor CEO Peter Braam, the original developer of Lustre, joined Xyratex as part of the transaction and remains with the company today.
Xyratex is trying to build a reputation for itself as a leading storage systems provider. To do that, the company is leveraging its expertise in high-performance storage systems, for which Lustre is an appropriate parallel file system technology. Xyratex generated sales of roughly $1.2bn for the 12 months ended November 2012. For its part, Oracle divests a business that it hadn’t been investing in anyway.
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