NetApp intends to purchase cloud storage ByCast
If you keep up to date with the storage world, yesterday NetApp announced they are intending to acquire ByCast. ByCast is a small company that has been quietly working on the “storage cloud” solution for its customers who are looking for object based archiving. It’s a great idea to be able to drop a file that you need archived and it get’s magically wooshed off to the “storage cloud” for later retrieval.
F5 has worked with ByCast at Yale New Haven Medical Hospital, University of Irvine, IBM and others. What we provide for customers who have ByCast, is a great way to migrate or tier data that has a need to be archived with our policy engine.
Another note IBM GMAS, which is IBM’s Medical Cloud Storage solution, is ByCast under the covers. I have noticed on a few of the blogs out there that people have questioned the importance of ByCast if their customer base is only 250. Well those customers are not small shops they are shops that have serious data and archiving needs and have been very successful with their ByCast solutions
I think this is a great addition to the NetApp family. This will give NetApp a greater tools set to compete better with the EMC who has had this capability for awhile with the Centerra.
Why is this good for F5 and its customers?
· F5 has a great ongoing relationship with the ByCast development team over 18 months of working together
· This acquisition indicates that NetApp acknowledges value of storage diversity reinforcing F5 ARX core competency of data mobility across diverse storage technology.
· NetApp has validated strategic value of private and public Cloud by buying an important infrastructure component – now all major storage players have object, scale out NAS and block solutions
· Strengthens F5 and NetApps relationship and set of solutions for customers