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5 year OEM of BlueArc’s Titan and Mercury product lines, HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) will be acquiring BlueArc.  This of course will be a great combination of companies, and I imagine will be a very accelerated ramp up as HDS already has everything in place to absorb BlueArc in a great way.  HDS isn’t one to buy companies.  This will be among one few and one of the largest acquisitions for HDS.  Exciting times for BlueArc and HDS, scary times for NetApp I would imagine.

Press Releases here: http://www.hds.com/corporate/press-analyst-center/press-releases/2011/gl110907.html?_p=v

and here:http://www.bluearc.com/storage-news/press-releases/110907-Hitachi-Data-Systems-Announces-Acquisition-of-BlueArc.shtml

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I will be attending VMWare’s VMWorld this year for a few days.  I look forward to meeting new folks as well as seeing faces that I don’t get to see other then on the trade show floor.  Email me if you are going to be in attendance.

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     Well it took me a little bit, but it looks like Marc Farley has stopped the roughly ramblings and industry insights, audio captures, car video recordings, and cartoon parodies.  It was nice to see that Marc wasn’t censored by HP over the past several months, which was a clear action of Dell when Marc’s Equallogic focused blog was filtered by corporate marketing.

      I am sure it will be on to bigger and better things for Marc, maybe 3D video, maybe blogging time travel, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have the first storage blog from outer space.  Regardless, in the current silence he is missed.

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In recent news Pillar Data Systems, mostly funded by Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle, in case you didn’t know, but also one of the Top 10 richest people in the WORLD), is being bought by, ORACLE.  Pillar Data Systems, which by any industry standard has been grossly unsuccessful, is being acquired by Oracle for a whopping $0.00.  Well, lets not let facts ruin a good story, in theory, if the Pillar storage product line makes money, which would be a first for the product so far, Larry would personally get paid back his investment first.  So far Oracle has clearly done a stellar job of acquisition of SUN and therefore StorageTek, whose disk products are mainly OEM deals with either LSI (now NetApp) and HDS.  Can’t wait to see yet another set of storage products go wasted.

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     Well it looks like NetApp is making what I consider to be a very low offer on LSI’s storage business.  LSI’s storage line is the OEM behind many vendor’s product lines.  LSI’s disk systems power storage offered by IBM, DELL, BlueArc, Oracle/SUN/STK, CRAY, Panasas, SEPATON, SGI, and Terascala to name a few.

     For less then $500 Million NetApp hits these vendor’s storage lines pretty hard, or rather has the ability to do so.  I would have figured that LSI’s storage business would have been worth more, but maybe the above vendors aren’t selling as much as I had imagined.

     So now I ask myself what does NetApp want with an FPGA based, FC and SAS storage company?  Where will this fit into the NetApp product line?  Will NetApp be dropping it’s software based RAID-DP for a hardware based solution?  Will this new storage backend allow for a greater capacity and performance from NetApp?

Time will tell, but I have a feeling that we will be seeing some major changes to the NetApp backend storage configurations in the near future.