Thought Leadership
It’s a strategic move in the storage market, but the acquisition of Arcastream’s Parallel File System business is set to revolutionize storage strategy – the deal also raises questions.
DataCore is expanding its storage portfolio with the acquisition of Arcastream, thereby repositioning itself in the market for enterprise storage solutions. The acquisition is primarily intended to improve the flexibility of file systems and open up new customer groups.
What is behind the takeover?
The acquisition complements DataCore’s existing solutions for block, object and container storage with high-performance file systems. With Arcastream’s expertise in parallel file systems, DataCore can now offer a universal storage portfolio.
Datacore’s Universal Storage Suite now comprises three blocks:
- Reliable block storage: SANsymphony has been providing trusted enterprise storage virtualization for mission-critical structured data workloads for over 25 years. OpenEBS extends this expertise with high-performance, persistent container-native storage solutions for Kubernetes-based stateful applications.
- Scalable object storage: Swarm is an S3 private cloud solution for protection and active archiving of large unstructured data sets. The platform can scale up to petabyte and exabyte requirements and accelerates content search and retrieval through advanced metadata management.
- High-performance file storage: Arcastream presents a parallel file system with global namespace that offers high throughput and efficiency for demanding workloads. The solution meets specific customer requirements for processing semi-structured and unstructured data and ensures consistent performance.
The new technology
The Arcastream solution scores with:
- global namespace
- high throughput
- Eeficient processing of complex workloads
The existing partnership with Dell is particularly interesting. The company already uses IBM Storage Scale and could benefit from the new solution.
The question marks
Nevertheless, the takeover comes as a surprise to industry observers. DataCore had already failed to successfully implement earlier attempts in the filestorage segment – for example with Hammerspace. CEO Dave Zabrowski has been pursuing a growth strategy in recent years. In view of his CEO approach at his stations before Datacore, we suspect a possible company sale or IPO. Either way, experts expect an exit strategy in the foreseeable future. In any case, the software-defined storage provider would be an asset to the portfolio of one of the major storage providers.
Outlook
The coming quarters will show whether this acquisition brings the hoped-for strategic added value. It will also be interesting to see how alternative providers such as Egnyte, LucidLink and Quobyte react to this acquisition.
