HP announced on Friday it has signed an agreement to purchase privately-held storage software company IBRIX. IBRIX, a business partner of HP’s, builds file serving software for high-performance storage computing and cloud computing environments.
The firm has been an HP business partner for three years and its products are offered on a variety of HP rack and blade servers, including HP StorageWorks storage area networks (SANs), HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem, and HP ProCurve Ethernet switches and management software.
“One of the things that were greatly excited about that is customers today are asking us increasingly to help them with their scale-out business models,” said Jeff Hausman, vice president of Unified Storage in the StorageWorks Division of HP (NYSE: HPQ), during a conference call announcing the deal.
“Today most organizations are having a hard time managing large amounts of data,” he added. “Often times the management of that data is causing system bottlenecks if you will. So they are looking for us to drive technology solutions to help them more easily and more cost effectively and manage this growth and at the same time help their app performance. That drives their competitiveness in the market.”
IBRIX’s main product is called Fusion, a parallel file system designed for high availability, high scalability and offering strong data protection. The firm promises “non-disruptive growth and infinite scalability” with Fusion, and the company Web site claims it can build file systems that can scale capacity “up to tens of petabytes in a single global namespace” and offer “tens of gigabytes per second of bandwidth and millions of IOPs of aggregate performance.”
HP has been made several moves into large-scale storage. HP said the IBRIX technology will be integrated into its StorageWorks division after the acquisition is closed, which is expected to happen within 30 days.
The software is designed to be vendor-neutral, so it runs on any server connected to any storage device.
IBRIX, based in Billerica, Mass., has 53 employees and claims more than 175 enterprise customers in the communications, media, entertainment, Internet, oil and gas, health care, life sciences, and financial services industries.
