Western Digital Buys All-Flash Storage Array Maker Skyera

Storage giant Western Digital and its wholly-owned subsidiary HGST are digging further into the data center and advancing HGST'S enterprise flash business with the acquisition of all-flash array maker Skyera.

Western Digital and Dell previously invested $51 million in Skyera, whose ultra-dense enterprise solid state storage systems have won many awards and enterprise customers in its short four-year history. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Skyera's intellectual property and engineering talent will be folded into HGST's operations and support strategic growth objectives for the solid-state storage portfolio, according to the company. HGST purchased another early innovator in the SSD market called sTec in 2013.

Skyera brings plenty of system-level hardware design knowledge and enterprise flash expertise to HGST. Its founders Radoslav Danilak and Rod Mullendore have worked at SandForce, a flash memory controller company now owned by Seagate.

Skyera partners for its NAND Flash with Toshiba, and then adds its proprietary high-performance Flash controller and hardware accelerated services. The company has also partnered with flash chip provider SK hynix for its skyEagle all-Flash enterprise storage array.

"Western Digital and Skyera have had a long-term strategic partnership. By combining Skyera's innovative flash platform with HGST's leading solid-state storage solutions and flash virtualization software we plan to provide breakthrough value and capabilities to help customers transform their cloud and enterprise data center infrastructure," Mike Cordano, president of HGST, said in a statement. "Flash solutions represent a large, exciting growth area for HGST and uniquely complement our existing portfolio."

HGST will find plenty of competition in the active and growing enterprise SSD market, from Violin Memory and SanDisk among many others. Last spring EMC boosted its enterprise flash storage portfolio by acquiring SSD startup DSSD.