EMC Corporation has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held DSSD.
Menlo Park-based DSSD is the developer of innovative new rack-scale flash storage architecture for I/O-intensive in-memory databases and Big Data workloads like SAP HANA and Hadoop. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014, subject to customary closing conditions.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2014 fiscal year.
DSSD will operate as a standalone unit within EMC’s Emerging Technology Products Division, reporting to Chirantan Desai.
DSSD president and CEO Bill Moore, formerly Sun Microsystems’ Chief Storage Engineer, ZFS co-lead and 3Par’s first employee, will lead the DSSD business within EMC. Andy Bechtolsheim, who is also chairman and chief development officer of Arista Networks, and formerly a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, will serve as DSSD’s strategic advisor.
As customers take advantage of the mega trends of social, mobile, cloud and Big Data, it will become critical to store and analyse the vast amounts of data that do not fit into main memory. Having assembled one of the most accomplished systems and storage engineering teams in Silicon Valley, DSSD has cracked the code on this dilemma.
Andy Bechtolsheim says, “The prospects of what EMC and DSSD can achieve together are truly remarkable. We ventured out to create a new storage tier for transactional and Big Data applications that have the highest performance I/O requirements. Working together with EMC, DSSD will deliver a new type of storage system with game-changing latency, IOPS and bandwidth characteristics while offering the operational efficiency of shared storage.”
David Goulden, CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure, says, “EMC established a relationship with DSSD more than a year ago. EMC led the Series A investment in DSSD and has remained an active development partner. We’re now thrilled to be joining forces with Andy, Bill and the entire DSSD team.
“While flash stands among IT’s most disruptive technologies, its impact and opportunity will become even more pronounced as customers enter the 3rd Platform of IT. Complementary to our market-leading all-flash and hybrid storage portfolio, DSSD will unlock an abundance of new possibilities for customers as they build out their infrastructures to support the emerging tier of next-generation in-memory and Big Data workloads.”
Products based on the new DSSD rack-scale flash storage architecture are expected to be available in 2015 and will be optimised for:
* In-memory databases (like SAP HANA or GemFire);
* Realtime analytics (such as risk management, fraud detection, high-frequency applications or Pivotal HD); and
* High-performance applications used by research and government agencies (such as genomics, facial recognition and climate analysis).
Customers desiring a platform capable of delivering unprecedented performance for I/O- intensive Big Data and in-memory applications like SAP HANA and Hadoop will choose DSSD rack-scale flash storage as the fastest tier in their multi-tier storage architecture.
