NetApp's biggest acquisition in history, SolidFire, puts the company on better competitive footing in the flash array market relative to leaders EMC (XtremIO and soon DSSD), HP (3PAR), IBM, and Pure Storage. It follows an October quarter in which NetApp's product revenue, pressured by share loss (including to flash array platforms) and cloud storage adoption, fell 12% yr/yr to $819m.
The deal, worth about $870m, will make a moderate dent in NetApp's $4.8bn cash balance, is expected to close in the April quarter. NetApp says: "SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications ... Over time, SolidFire products will be incorporated into NetApp's data fabric strategy, delivering seamless data management across flash, disk and cloud resources."
For now at least, NetApp indicates it will continue supporting its All Flash FAS (AFF) and EF Series arrays. It argues AFF targets traditional enterprise buyers, the EF Series high-performance applications, and SolidFire the "next-generation infrastructure buyer" seeking "seamless scalability, white-box economics, and radically simple management."