After the VMworld storm has slowly died down it is back to business again… This also means less frequent updates, although we are slowly moving towards VMworld Barcelona and I suspect there will be some new announcements at that time. So what happened in the world of flash/startups the last two weeks? This is Startup News Flash part 5, and it seems to be primarily around either funding rounds or acquisitions.
Probably one of the biggest rounds of funding I have seen for a “new world” storage company… $ 150 million. Yes, that is a lot of money. Congrats Pure Storage! I would expect an IPO at some point in the near future, and hopefully they will be expanding their EMEA based team. PureStorage is one of those companies which has always intrigued me. As GigaOm suggests this boosts will probably be used to lower the prices, but personally I would prefer a heavy investment in things like disaster recovery and availability. It is an awesome platform, but in my opinion it needs dedupe aware sync and a-sync replication! That should include VMware SRM integration from day 1 of course!
Flash is hot… Virident just got acquired by Western Digital for $685 million. Makes sense if you consider WD is known as the “hard disk” company, they need to keep on growing their business and the business of hard disks is going to be challenging in the upcoming years with SSD becoming cheaper and cheaper. Considering this is the second acquisition (sTec being the other) related to flash by WD you can say that they mean business.
I just noticed that Cisco announced they intent to acquire Whiptail for $415 million in cash. Interesting to see Cisco moving in to the storage space and definitely a smart move if you ask me. With UCS for compute and Whiptail for storage they will be able to deliver the full stack considering they more or less already own the world of networking. Will be interesting to see how they integrate it in their UCS offerings. For those who don’t know, Whiptail is an all flash array (afa) which leverages a “scale out” approach, so start small and increase capacity by adding new boxes. Of course they offer most functionality other AFA vendors do, for more details I recommend reading Cormac’s excellent article.
To be honest, no one knew what to expect from this public VSAN Beta announcement. Would we get a couple of hundred registrations or thousands? Well I can tell you that they are going through the roof, make sure to register though if you want to be a part of this! Run it at home nested, run it on your test cluster at the office, do whatever you want with it… but make sure to provide feedback!