EMC has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held DSSD.
Silicon Valley-based DSSD is the developer of an innovative new rack-scale flash storage architecture for I/O-intensive in-memory databases and Big Data workloads like SAP HANA and Hadoop. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014, subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2014 fiscal year.
DSSD will operate as a standalone unit within EMC’s Emerging Technology Products Division reporting to Chirantan " C.J." Desai. DSSD President and CEO Bill Moore – will lead the DSSD business within EMC.
Andy Bechtolsheim – described by EMC CEO Joe Tucci as the Steve Jobs of hardware – formerly a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, will serve as DSSD ‘s strategic advisor.
As customers take advantage of the mega trends of social, mobile, cloud and Big Data, it will become critical to store and analyse the vast amounts of data that do not fit into main memory. Having assembled one of the most accomplished systems and storage engineering teams in Silicon Valley, DSSD has cracked the code on this dilemma.
Bechtolsheim said: "The prospects of what EMC and DSSD can achieve together are truly remarkable. We ventured out to create a new storage tier for transactional and Big Data applications that have the highest performance I/O requirements. Working together with EMC, DSSD will deliver a new type of storage system with game-changing latency, IOPS and bandwidth characteristics while offering the operational efficiency of shared storage."
David Goulden, CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure, said: "EMC established a relationship with DSSD more than a year ago. EMC led the Series A investment in DSSD and has remained an active development partner. We’re now thrilled to be joining forces with Andy, Bill and the entire DSSD team. While flash stands among IT’s most disruptive technologies, its impact and opportunity will become even more pronounced as customers enter the 3rd Platform of IT. Complementary to our market-leading all-flash and hybrid storage portfolio, DSSD will unlock an abundance of new possibilities for customers as they build out their infrastructures to support the emerging tier of next-generation in-memory and Big Data workloads. "
Products based on the new DSSD rack-scale flash storage architecture are expected to be available in 2015 and will be optimized for:
– In-memory databases (e.g. SAP HANA, GemFire, etc.)
– Real-time analytics (e.g. risk management, fraud detection, high-frequency applications, Pivotal HD, etc.)
– High-performance applications used by research and government agencies (e.g. genomics, facial recognition, climate analysis, etc.)
