NetApp To Acquire Decru

Network Appliance on Thursday said it plans to acquire Decru, a Redwood City, Calif.-based storage security appliance vendor, in a $272 million deal.

The acquisition is expected to close in October, after which Decru will become a business unit within NetApp. With the move, NetApp would the second major storage vendor to tie storage and security. Next week, Symantec and Veritas Software shareholders are slated to vote on the companies' $13.5 billion merger.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp is the leading vendor of NAS appliances, with nearly a 37 percent share of the global NAS market as of the end of last year, according to research firm IDC. EMC was No. 2 with almost 33 percent share.

Decru's DataFort appliances insert a layer of encryption, authentication, access control and compartmentalization into storage. The products add security to data at wire speed when combined with SAN, NAS, direct-attached, iSCSI and tape storage devices from various vendors to protect data across a network and in the storage hardware. The appliances can be deployed without changing customers' current server and storage infrastructures, according to NetApp.

NetApp and Decru aren't strangers. Early this month, NetApp unveiled a program to integrate credit-card and Payment Card Industry (PCI) modules from Decru into its data protection and regulatory compliance data management solutions. The program is designed to develop a turnkey solution, called CardVault, that securely stores credit-card data and supports compliance with new, mandatory PCI security standards to prevent identity theft.

Decru was founded in mid-2001 and has received $45 million in venture investments, including funds from In-Q-Tel, the fund established by the CIA in 1999 to invest in emerging developers of security technologies.