EMC is eyeing a startup whose technology turns server-side disk capacity into cloud-enabled storage.
According to a report in TechCrunch, the IT storage systems maker is acquiring ScaleIO for $200 million to $300 million. ScaleIO, with offices in Israel and Palo Alto, Calif., is a software provider that is riding the bleeding edge of the burgeoning software defined storage market. Geektime, an Israeli tech blog, first reported the news.
Both EMC and ScaleIO have yet to make an official announcement.
In December, ScaleIO emerged from stealth and announced that it had raised $12 million from Greylock Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and private investors. The company’s early customers include SAP and Check Point Software.
The company’s flagship offering is ScaleIO ECS, which stands for Elastic Converged Storage. ECS pools the local disk capacity of application servers and presents it as a virtual SAN, allowing organizations to grow and scale their storage while scaling back — or completely eliminating in some cases — their SAN infrastructure investments.
The savings are significant. By the company’s estimates, organizations can cut enterprise storage costs by up to 80 by switching to ECS’s virtual SAN tech and leveraging their server-side storage resources. In turn, total IT budgets can achieve cost savings of up to 28 percent.
Upon publicly debuting his company, CEO Boaz Palgi touted ScaleIO’s software defined approach storage approach as the remedy to fast-growing cloud infrastructures.
“ECS makes storage as inconspicuous as CPU and RAM. Running seamlessly alongside business applications, ECS enables data centers to be built wall to wall from commodity servers only,” said Palgi in a company statement.
ScaleIO’s elastic, block storage capable platform supports all leading Linux distributions, hypervisors and drive technologies, including solid-state drives (SSDs) and traditional hard drives (HDDs), according to the company.
The startup is also getting an early jump on the ARM in the datacenter trend.
ECS supports both x86 and ARM-based microarchitectures. Of late, tech companies like Dell, HP and AMD have been exploring ways to harness computing capabilities of ARM’s mobile chip designs for energy-efficient cloud computing infrastructures.
