Western Digital buys up all-flash array specialist Tegile Systems

Tegile to form key part of WD's Data Center Systems business

Western Digital has concluded a deal to buy storage hardware vendor Tegile Systems in a deal that will add Tegile's technology to Fusion-io, a company that came bundled with its $19bn SanDisk acquisition last year.

The acquisition of Tegile comes at the same time that the company, as part of a consortium including private equity and two Japanese state-linked investment firms, is also expected to conclude a deal to take Toshiba Memory Corporation off of Toshiba's hands.

Tegile Systems describes its products as hybrid and all-flash arrays, which has become not just a crowded market, but one with some heavyweight competitors, including Dell EMC, IBM and HP. Tegile therefore needed an equally heavyweight 'supporter' on its side.

Rohit Kshetrapal, CEO and co-founder of Tegile, was understandably delighted at the acquisition.

"Since the early days of Tegile, Western Digital has been a great partner of ours - first as a supplier, then as an investor, and now as a strategic vendor with a clear goal of building a long-term strategy to deliver complete storage systems," wrote Kshetrapal in a blog posting revealing the acquisition.

He continued: "We built an extremely flexible storage management platform that is capable of leveraging different grades of storage media to deliver memory-like performance with the best possible economics.

"We then added value by offering multi-protocol support, flexible management capabilities, and cloud-based predictive analytics so customers can significantly maximise uptime, consolidate workloads, and simplify storage administration."

One of the things that Kshetrapal was most delighted about - in addition to the money - was the lack of product overlap between the two companies, meaning that Tegile's products and technology won't be absorbed and expunged, but will form a key part of WD's Data Center Systems (DCS) business.

The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

WD chief operating officer Mike Cordano said that the "Tegile acquisition will fit perfectly in Western Digital's long-term strategy" to "deliver high value solutions that address customers' rapidly evolving storage needs".

The anticipated shift in enterprise and data centre storage from conventional hard disk drives to flash wasn't exactly unforeseen and the market was already somewhat crowded by start-ups by 2012, when Tegile Systems emerged from "stealth mode".

Founded by Kshetrapal, along with Rajesh Nair, Justin Cheen, and Alok Agrawal, it underwent a series of funding rounds, receiving $174.5 in total funding over six rounds since it was founded - with both SanDisk Ventures and Western Digital itself involved in the latter stages.

Indeed, WD was the lead investor in its last funding round, raising $33m, in April this year.