EMC Strengthens Flash Portfolio With ScaleIO Acquisition

Accelerating its strategy to deliver Flash across the enterprise server and storage EMC announced it will acquire privately-held ScaleIO. Adding ScaleIO's highly scalable server software with PCIe Flash cards to EMC XtremSF PCIe cards will increase EMC's portfolio for Enterprise Private Cloud and Service Provider environments.

ScaleIO Elastic Converged Storage (ECS) software will become part of the EMC XtremSW Suite of Flash storage software. The software approach that ScaleIO takes creates a virtual pool of server-based storage by logically combining SSDs, PCIe Flash cards, HDDs—or any combination of these devices. It provides support for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments and scales from tens to thousands of servers. Upon closing, ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Product Division.

Earlier in the year EMC Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Flash Products Division Zahid Hussain talked about how Flash has become ubiquitous and was deployed in a number of different places with a number of different use cases. As he pointed out, software will evolve at each layer of the infrastructure stack, and with the ScaleIO acquisition EMC accelerates its ability to abstract the properties of different types of Flash with software that manages all flavors of Flash across the data center.  In a recent blog post Zahid Hussain talks about ScaleIO, its capabilities, and the future of building upon the ECS core.

“Flash now permeates every layer of IT—in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. Enterprise workloads are diverse in nature, and EMC is committed to offering our customers and partners choice in their Flash deployments," said David Goulden, President and Chief Operating Officer at EMC. "ScaleIO is a natural extension to our best-of-breed portfolio. It strengthens our product capabilities in the area of server-side storage and brings a world class team that will undoubtedly enable us to innovate more quickly in the future.”