EMC And NetApp Poised To Fight Over Green Storage Company?

Information management company EMC is holding talks to buy XtremIO, an Israeli manufacturer of all-flash enterprise data storage systems, reports local business news site Globes.

It is thought that the price of acquisition lies in the range of $400-450 million (£248 – £279 million).

Last week, XtremIO won the Uptime Institute’s  2012 Green Enterprise IT Award in the IT Product Deployment category, which recognised that its all-flash arrays can improve energy and resource efficiency. According to Globes, EMC’s rival NetApp is also interested in XtremIO.

Green Flash

XtremIO was founded in 2009 and has offices in Herzliya, Israel and San Jose, California.

According to The Globe, in recent months, senior executives from EMC, including CEO Joseph Tucci, have been in Israel and have been holding aggressive acquisition talks with the company. At least two senior executives from VMWare have also visited the country and “market sources believe that an acquisition is close at hand”.

XtremIO won the Uptime Institute award for its customer installation that dramatically reduced environmental requirements (data centre floor space, power consumption, and cooling requirements) for a large SAP/Oracle application, while simultaneously improving processing and eliminating complex configuration and performance tuning requirements.

Rather than adapt existing designs to incorporate flash, or use flash as a caching layer or a tier, XtremIO built a storage array that from day one was engineered to only use the fast solid state memory.

Its flash array provided power savings of 82 percent, or nearly $19,000 per year, over the previous generation hard disk drive-based systems. In addition, XtremIO array occupied 90 percent less rack space, and provided a tenfold improvement in performance.

The company has raised $25 million in two financing rounds, and founders and employees are expected to profit handsomely from any exit, even though it has yet to generate revenue. XtremIO storage systems could be generally available later this year.

Sstorage is EMC’s core business. The company has recently announced its first-quarter earnings rose 23 percent, mainly fuelled by storage hardware and software sales. XtremIO acquisition could strengthen EMC’s position even further, unless one of its competitors snaps up the environmentally-minded wonder-firm.

But it might not get it all its own way, as NetApp could step in. “It’s no secret that EMC and Netapp see each other as mortal enemies and Netapp would love the opportunity to put EMC off track,” commented Chris Evans at Sys-Con.  “Would Netapp have either the nerve or deep enough pockets to take EMC on?  Probably not, but it could make them pay even more to acquire XtremIO in the first place.”

Are you fluent in the language of the Internet? Take our quiz!