Led by an array of former Isilon executives, Qumulo says it will attack the $35 billion enterprise storage market, although it’s not saying how just yet. Highland Capital Partners leads the Series A round with help from Madrona Venture group and Valhalla Partners.
Hadoop is on its way to becomig the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without some flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings right now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System.
Red Hat’s planned $136 million purchase of Gluster should give the enterprise Linux leader a strong play in the cloud-inflected world of scale-out storage. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions by vendors trying to stake a claim in the storage of unstructured data.
EMC Corp. said today it will acquire scale-out storage provider Isilon Systems in an all-cash deal worth $2.25 billion. The deal is one of several high-profile acquisitions and fundings in the storage space as companies try to handle the data created by our online activity.
Lest we forget, the trend of buying up smaller companies to fill large vendors’ Big Data portfolios isn’t limited to analytics. As we are reminded today with news that Isilon Systems is up for sale, scale-out storage companies also have been in the M&A crosshairs over the past year-plus (e.g., Bycast, Ibrix, 3PAR, etc.). Expect an offer to come soon, possibly from Dell, which seems to be mentioned as a potential buyer of everybody these days. Regardless who ends up with Isilon, though, will have a much stronger scale-out storage story to tell.
The folks in charge of the SC 08 conference being held in Austin, Texas, this week have trumpeted the phenomenal growth of the supercomputing show, with attendance up by almost 10 percent from the previous year, but I’m beginning to doubt that high-performance computing is driving this growth as much as the broad changes in the data center world. As Ori Aruj, CEO a GM of switch chipmaker Dune Networks, told me when I asked why he was at the show, “This is no longer about high-performance computing and research. This is now a data center conference.” Read More about SC08: The New Data Center Conference?
