HDS Acquisition Closes NAS Back Door

One the ways solution providers know a market is hot is when there is a wave of mergers and acquisitions driven major vendors jockeying for position.

Such is the case with network-attached storage (NAS), which thanks to unrestrained growth of unstructured data is a space that attracting a lot of attention these days. The latest merger came this week when Hitachi Data Systems announced it is acquiring BlueArc, a provider of NAS storage systems that HDS had been reselling.

According to Linda Xu, HDS senior director worldwide marketing, HDS is acquiring BlueArc just to make sure that its technology doesn’t leave the corporate fold. Customers she said were concerned that if they invested in HDS’ NAS product line they would wake up one morning to discover that the technology had been acquired by another company.

Hu says that HDS will now invest in expanding the BlueArc product portfolio as part of the company’s overall “Scale Right” strategy, which is designed to allow customers to scale up, out or deep depending on their requirements. That strategy, says Hu, differs markedly from rival vendors that either offer only a scale out or up approach to managing data storage growth.

Most the trench warfare over storage these days is being fought in the channel, which means solution providers have a lot of options these days. The good news that for the foreseeable future the storage market appears to be growing, which means that storage should prove to be a reliable source of revenue for solution providers for years to come.