HP has announced hat it has finalised a deal to acquire file server specialist IBRIX and its parallelised, scale-out file-serving software for an undisclosed amount.
Privately-held IBRIX is a competitor in the clustered NAS space alongside Exanet, Isilon, NetApp, with ONTAP GX, and Panasas.
The company said that the deal will allow it to further advance its enterprise storage operation. IBRIX develops network storage systems, specialising in large scale applications, such as user-generated content services.
IBRIX has been an HP partner since 2006, and also has partnerships with Dell, EMC and Rackable.
HP says it will add IBRIX’s software to its StorageWorks product portfolio for the emerging market of scale-out and high-performance computing storage, cloud storage, and fixed content archiving. HP reckons this market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 20 per cent, faster than both the network attached storage (NAS) and total external storage markets.
IBRIX was founded in 2000 by ex-Yale University maths professor Steven Orszag. The idea was to speed I/O between servers and high-capacity storage with a single namespace parallel file system parallelising the file I/O between storage devices and servers used in cluster, grid, and enterprise computing. The Fusion software which was introduced in February 2005 includes a scalable volume manager and high availability features. Fusion can scale to 100s of petabytes of capacity, with more than 1TB/sec of aggregate throughput.
HP said that it hopes to integrate the IBRIX software into its high performance storage and cloud computing platforms. The software will be bundled with HP Storage Area Network, ProLiant, BladeSystem and ProCurve hardware offerings.
HP bought cluster file software supplier PolyServe in February 2007. It introduced its own scale-out hardware NAS product, the ExDS9100 in 2008 and that used the PolyServe software. How IBRIX software might play with the PolyServe technology is not known.
“Customers need highly scalable storage solutions that efficiently and cost-effectively manage massive amounts of information,”
said Jeff Hausman, vice president of unified storage for HP’s StorageWorks division.
“This acquisition expands our portfolio to better support the needs of this market segment.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, HP said that it hopes to finalise the transaction within 30 days.
HP now has quite a technology portfolio in the scale-out NAS space and is going to be much tougher competition for Exadata, Isilon, NetApp and Panasas.
IBRIX Fusion removed I/O bottlenecks in our file systems, allowing our rendering application to perform as much as 100 per cent faster in a stable and highly scalable environment, plus, we were able to migrate data on-the-fly without shutting down production. (J Brooks, Disney)
