Western Digital says it is acquiring Tegile, a specialist in fast “flash” storage systems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Flash storage systems incorporate solid-state storage, which is faster but can be more delicate than the disk storage that dominated in most companies’ data centers up until recently. Flash storage is also more pricey than disk drives although that cost has been falling.
Tegile’s move comes three months after [hotlink]Hewlett Packard Enterprise[/hotlink] (HPE) paid $1 billion to acquire Nimble Storage, another flash storage seller and rival to Tegile and Pure Storage (PSTG), among others.
Interestingly, HPE’s former chief technology officer Martin Fink, who had retired from that company in 2016, came out of retirement early this year to become CTO of Western Digital.
San Jose-based Western Digital (WDC) has been a Tegile investor for a few years, and led a Series E funding round of $33 million in April. Overall, Tegile, Newark, Calif., had taken in about $175 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2009.
In an interview with Fortune, Tegile CEO Rohit Kshetrapal, says all of the company’s 300 employees will move over to Western Digital.
“There is definitely consolidation in this market,” Kshetrapal acknowledges. “The conundrum for startups is that it’s expensive to build a company both in terms of product development and sales and marketing.”
Western Digital’s size could help with that.
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Long-time data storage power EMC, now part of Dell Technologies, jumped into flash storage with a series of acquisitions starting with that of XtremIO in 2013. EMC rival NetApp (NTAP), bought SolidFire another flash provider two years later. And then there are the “pure play” flash storage players like the aforementioned Pure Storage, Tintri, and Kaminario.
This acquisition will bring some 1,700 Tegile customers, which include the U.S. Department of Defense and Bookings.com, to Western Digital.
The news comes a day after Western Digital announced its acquisition of Upthere, a cloud-based storage service for consumers’ photos, music, and video files. Terms were not disclosed on that purchase either.
Note: (August 29, 11:48 a.m.) This story was updated to add mention of NetApp’s acquisition of SolidFire and of Western Digital’s day-old acquisition of Upthere.