NetApp Acquires Riverbed's Backup Appliance Line for $80M

NetApp announced it has acquired Riverbed's SteelStore line of storage backup appliances for about $80 million. The move adds a cloud-integrated storage product line for NetApp and rids Riverbed of a non-core offering.

NetApp's chief strategy officer Jonathan Kissane said the "product, coupled with our broad ecosystem of application and cloud service providers, will give enterprises a heterogeneous backup solution to leverage the flexibility and economics of the cloud for their backup and recovery needs."

Formerly branded as Whitewater, the Riverbed SteelStore line makes it easy for enterprises to integrate with existing backup software and will compress, deduplicate, encrypt, and stream data to a cloud provider of choice.

Calling the acquisition a logical extension to NetApp, Riverbed chairman and CEO Jerry Kennelly said it "allows NetApp customers to extend existing backup, archive, and disaster recovery to the cloud."

Activist investor Elliott Management may have had some influence in the sale, as it has been pressuring Riverbed for organizational changes for almost a year.