NetApp Acquisition of SolidFire – My View
NetApp’s $870 million acquisition of SolidFire was much discussed news after Dell and EMC merger in the year 2015. This acquisition solidifies the future roadmap for all-flash storage. We have seen flash industry has grown quite significantly in the year 2015 and is predicted to be considered as the primary storage option replacing hard disk drives in 2016. The upward trend of all-flash storage array business was one of the major reasons of this acquisition. This all-flash business was first driven by startups that challenged large storage vendors with high-performance solutions. This resulted in dropping flash storage prices. All large storage enterprises started feeling the heat and responded with acquisitions of some startups or via creating their own flash technology. I believe NetApp was not very comfortable with flash to date, even though they tried building their own all-flash solutions. They always tried to compensate their expertise on all-flash with the inorg...