EMC is looking to the clouds with its acquisition of TwinStrata, a storage appliance and CloudArray software offering that handles secure cloud data transfers. The move should help EMC integrate TwinStrata's technology into EMC's new VMAX3 enterprise data game plan.
While the terms of the deal are not known, a number of outlets report it appears similar to the Microsoft purchase of StorSimple. That could position Microsoft and EMC to battle it out over the cloud storage market, which has seen massive growth in recent times.
TwinStrata CEO and co-founder Nicos Vekiarides confirms this concept in a letter: "We are looking to integrate CloudArray into the new VMAX3 enterprise data service platform to allow you to automatically tier workloads even more seamlessly for off-premise storage capacity expansion, data protection and disaster recovery."
The aim is to offer users some of the most innovative and efficient data storage on the market and should put EMC, already a storage leader, into the driver's seat in cloud services.
As part of the acquisition, EMC's Information Infrastructure division has also said it will be launching new products for its top-shelf storage lines. The merger could also bring about innovative additions to the current products already on offer by the company.
The basic idea with the acquisition is to boost EMC's overall capacity with big data and to boost its hybrid cloud concept that would see it able to link cloud storage with physical, on-site public cloud resources. This would enable businesses and private users to use multiple platforms for multiple purposes, all while having adequate space and security for their files.
Overall, EMC hopes that it will be able to integrate all TwinStrata's technology with its own to run any EMC software storage product on VMAX. This will make its flagship high-end cloud storage arguably the leader in the industry. VMAX is an enterprise-class storage product line for large virtual data centers. It can scale to meet storage needs ranging from a small virtual server deployment to enterprise-class implementations of thousands of virtual machines requiring petabytes of capacity.
Many believe that cloud data storage will be important in terms of immediate growth as more and more companies utilize data storage from a number of access points. This acquisition could be a huge step for EMC to continue to expand.
