Hitachi Data Systems Acquires Backup Appliance Heavyweight Sepaton

Hitachi Data Systems boosted its data protection strategy recently by acquiring long time storage partner Sepaton. Besides spelling 'no tapes' backwards, Sepaton provides data protection solutions for data-intensive enterprise environments in the form of a purpose-built data backup appliance (PBBA). Its appliance boasts 80 TB/hour backup speeds on 64-bit processing nodes and the ability to scale capacity with 3.8 petabyte disk shelves (before deduplication).

Sean Moser, vice president of software platforms product management at HDS explained in a blog post that the acquisition was a good fit with its approach to "a service-level-oriented protection scheme that balances the cost of protection with the business needs for data availability – whether it’s number of copies, location of copies, or frequency of copies. This acquisition better enables us to help our customers reduce the cost of protection, enable more data to be protected against disaster and offer greater flexibility in where or how it is protected."

Sepaton has been a partner with HDS for many years and becomes one of many acquisitions HDS has made as it continues to build out its vision for data protection. Besides broadening its portfolio of offerings, the acquisition places HDS in a more direct competitive position with rivals EMC, IBM and others who are competing in the PBBA market. In the past HP sold branded versions of Sepaton appliances until phasing them out in favor of its own StoreOnce products.

Headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Sepaton will operate as an independent subsidiary of HDS. The deal brings many large customers, who have previously had combined solutions with Sepaton and HDS, under HDS' wing. The company also carries a handful of patents, including a 2014 one for Dynamic Deduplication.

The acquisition price was not mentioned, however, as a venture-backed company Sepaton has been around a long time and has received $98 million  in funding over the past 14 years.