EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Isilon Systems, a network attached storage systems company, for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.25bn.
Isilon provides ‘Scale-out NAS’ (network attached storage) systems, which along with EMC’s Atmos will provide customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data’.
Together, Isilon and EMC Atmos provide customers a complete storage infrastructure offering for managing ‘Big Data’ in private or public cloud environments.
The scale-out NAS systems are designed to begin small and scale quickly and non-disruptively up to 10 petabytes in size, with extremely high levels of performance and availability while Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.
EMC said that Big Data is a term used to describe the massive amount of data produced by a new generation of applications in markets such as life sciences, media and entertainment, and oil and gas.
EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci said the unmistakable waves of cloud computing and ‘Big Data’ are upon them and customers are looking for new ways to store, protect, secure and add intelligence to the vast amounts of information they will accumulate over the next decade.
"EMC, in combination with Isilon, sits at the intersection of these trends with leading products, offerings and services to help customers get the absolute most out of what cloud computing has to offer," Tucci said.
EMC expects the combined revenue of these two complementary storage offerings to reach a $1bn run-rate during the second half of 2012.