EMC may be close to acquiring XtremIO, an Israeli start-up developer of all-Flash storage arrays that has yet to ship products commercially.
The acquisition could be valued between $400 million and $450 million, a good return for investors in XtremIO, which has raised $25 million, according to the Israel-based Globes news site.
[Related: EMC Rolls Out PCIe Flash-Based Storage Technology]
An EMC spokesperson said the company does not comment on "rumor and speculation."
However, Globes has gained a strong reputation for early reports on acquisitions of Israeli companies by vendors such as Apple, Riverbed, Dell, VMware and EMC.
XtremIO was founded in 2009 as a developer of storage arrays based on Flash memory technology, with no hard drives installed.
Unlike many recent Flash-based storage technology introductions, the XtremIO products are not focused on caching data to improve performance, but instead on acting as primary storage for applications requiring high performance, including database, ERP and highly virtualized environments.
The XtremIO Flash arrays, which the company said are undergoing field testing, feature scale-out technology -- a modular architecture that allows the arrays to grow in performance terms even as capacity increases.
If EMC does acquire XtremIO, it would be the first major storage vendor to have an all-Flash storage offering. That part of the storage market is occupied primarily by start-ups including XtremIO, Violin Memory and Nimbus Data Systems.
EMC is no stranger to either the Flash-based storage technology business or to making acquisitions to fill holes in its strategy. EMC in 2008 was the first enterprise storage vendor to add SSDs to a storage array.
More recently, EMC introduced VFCache, a PCIe Flash-based storage solution that sits in servers and works with external arrays to increase storage performance across multiple tiers from the server to the cloud.
The company plans this quarter to unveil a follow-on product, code-named Project Thunder, a network appliance server consisting of Flash memory for accelerating storage networking performance.
