Western Digital Ups Its Flash Storage Game With Deal To Acquire Tegile
Storage giant Western Digital Tuesday unveiled a deal to acquire Tegile Systems, a maker of flash storage technologies focused on enterprise data centers.
The deal—the terms of which weren't disclosed—follows the acquisition of flash vendor Nimble by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1 billion this past spring.
[Related: Tegile Prepares To Release Line Of All-NVMe Flash Storage Arrays]
Founded in 2009, Newark, Calif.-based Tegile Systems specializes in all-flash and hybrid-flash storage offerings for enterprises, leveraging its speedy IntelliFlash architecture. The company had just last week unveiled a new line of arrays based entirely on high-performance NVMe (non-volatile memory express) all-flash technology. Tegile will bring 1,700 customers to Western Digital, according to a news release.
San Jose, Calif.-based Western Digital said it expects to close the acquisition during the week of Sept. 4.
In the release, the company said the Tegile products will complement its own ActiveScale products, which focus on big data. Tegile will become part of Western Digital's Data Center Systems (DCS) business unit.
"By combining Tegile's innovative storage system software with Western Digital's global scale and combination of components and systems, we expect DCS to capture a sizable share of flash array demand," said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital's Data Center Systems unit, in a news release.
Western Digital has been an investor in Tegile since 2013, and had led a $33 million funding round for the company in April. Western Digital possessed a "substantial" stake in Tegile following the recent round, Tegile CEO Rohit Kshetrapal told CRN at the time. Tegile has raised $178 million in total funding.
In the news release, Kshetrapal noted that Western Digital has "already enhanced various aspects of Tegile's business, including engineering integration, HDD/SSD supply chain efficiencies, go-to-market efforts and customer support," prior to the acquisition agreement.
Western Digital has previously gotten into the flash market through moves such as the development of 96-layer 3-D NAND flash technology, which debuted in June.