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A couple of old friends who worked at SonicWall together several years ago who had gone on to start up their own storage companies have decided to bring their companies together in order to produce more complete solutions for all of their customers.
Data protection software developer StorageCraft Technology of Draper, Utah announced Jan. 19 that it has acquired storage hardware/software maker Exablox of Sunnyvale, Calif., dropping StorageCraft smack in the middle of a large pool of storage IT sharks that include NetApp, HPE, Dell EMC, Pure Storage and a list of others.
Terms of the transaction were not released.
StorageCraft CEO Matt Medeiros and Exablox chief Doug Brockett, longtime friends and business partners, decided that the time was right to bring their two companies together, share the marketing and sales duties and provide new options for both sets of customers. Last October, the two companies enacted a distribution agreement based on the complementary benefits of their products.
Approach Acknowledges Fading of Lines Between Primary, Secondary Storage
Now the new combined company is moving ahead with an approach that recognizes the disappearing lines between primary and secondary storage as well as between data availability and data protection.
“We’ve been growing like gangbusters at Exablox for a few years now, garnering several hundred customers, but what one of the things we looked at was just how fast the industry is moving,” Brockett told eWEEK. “This was an opportunity to move beyond just a scale-out storage play into a much broader data management/data protection, with the addition of data protection, business continuity and data analytics with intelligence on the server side.”
“We knew we could either take our time, and within a couple of years roll out a big sales force and go after that ourselves. Or we could join forces with a company that already had a very compatible channel, a very large sales force, and frankly the software stack that made a much more complete solution for our customers.”
So the StorageCraft deal was made. With the acquisition, StorageCraft now becomes a provider of both primary and secondary storage to its channel partners, Medeiros told eWEEK.
Moving to Complete Data Management
“By adding Exablox’s converged mid-market storage technology, we go from being a leader in business continuity to a leader in the data management market,” Medeiros said. “Our customers’ businesses operate nonstop. At the same time that their data volumes are exploding, their uptime requirements are becoming more stringent.
“We now have the unique ability to address both of these problems and to do so with a solution that has groundbreaking scalability.”
Exablox, a VC-backed startup that launched its first product in April 2013, combines the on-site and cloud worlds by offering an on-premises storage appliance coupled with a cloud-based management system to handle unlimited cloud storage. As a unit, these provide a full feature set for storage administrators and uneasy boards of directors who want to know where their business data is at all times.
Exablox produces its flash- and hard drive-based, scale-out NAS storage packages using an original object storage architecture. Exablox’s customers include top Fortune 500 companies, prestigious research and educational institutions, leading technology innovators, and government entities.
StorageCraft provides highly regarded backup and recovery solutions that goes to market through a highly-developed and well-trained IT channel and managed service provider network.
Brockett told eWEEK that very little of the two companies’ products and services overlap. “We’re going to maintain the independence of both product lines, let our customers make their choices and deploy what they need in their systems,” Brockett said.
Key Attributes of the New Company
This acquisition provides the current and future customers of the combined company with a complete lineup of enterprise products for analyzing, protecting, and storing information, including:
—Data analytics: provides an intelligent, tiered data architecture that enables the identification and prioritization of critical data for protection and performance. It also identifies gaps in endpoint protection.
—Data protection: implements data protection policies that offer the industry’s best and most reliable recovery mechanisms. Frequent backups and efficiently-located mission-critical data minimize recovery time and maximize uptime.
—Data storage: delivers the ability to store all tiers of data with infinite scalability. The object-based storage appliance solves businesses’ common storage pain points of complex installation, cumbersome management, limited capacity and forklift upgrades.
Brockett will remain with the company as president and report directly to Medeiros, who will become StorageCraft’s chairman of the board. Exablox customers and partners will continue to be supported by their existing contacts to ensure a seamless transition, Brockett said.