NetApp said that it has agreed to to acquire privately held storage software maker Bycast, in an all-cash transaction, in a move to strengthen its position in unified storage with the addition of object-based storage software.
Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Bycast is a developer of object-based storage software designed to manage petabyte-scale, globally distributed repositories of images, video and records for enterprises and service providers. Object-based storage is an approach to store and access data based on object names and rich metadata that describes the content in greater detail.
NetApp said that the acquisition broadens its capabilities in serving verticals such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare and cloud services providers. It also helps them to expand into new opportunities and markets for petabyte-scale, billion-object content repositories.
Bycast’s Vancouver headquarters will become a technology centre for NetApp and will be responsible for existing Bycast products and future product development.
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Manish Goel, executive vice president of product operations at NetApp, said: Bycast extends our unified storage strategy and enhances our solution for shared storage infrastructure by adding new capabilities for global data access and mobility.
“The addition of Bycast’s products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings.
The acquisition, which is expected to close in May 2010, is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
