NetApp to Acquire Data-Protection Firm Topio

The $160 million acquisition will allow EMC, HP and HDS users to create data clones instantly without needing additional software or storage.

NetApp revealed Nov. 8 that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company intends to acquire neighboring Topio Software, a privately held Santa Clara, Calif.-based company with R&D in Haifa, Israel, for approximately $160 million in an all-cash transaction.

The acquisition is expected to close in December. Topio will become a new business unit within NetApp, and its research and development team will continue to operate in Israel, a NetApp spokesperson said.

Topio is known within the data protection industry for home-grown software that helps customers replicate, recover and protect data over any distance—regardless of the underlying server or storage infrastructure, the spokesperson said.

Topios products will augment NetApps data management solutions that enable enterprises to replicate their production data on any vendor system—including EMC, HP or HDS—to any NetApp storage system, the spokesperson said.

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The joint capabilities of Topio and NetApp will deliver data protection, data migration and data cloning, the spokesperson said.

"The average enterprise creates and stores anywhere between 10 and 20 copies of its data, including testing and application development data," said Jay Kidd, NetApp senior vice president and general manager, Emerging Products Group.

Read more here about NetApp and CommVaults storage package for SMBs.

"This is both expensive and time-consuming. With the addition of Topio, enterprises using legacy storage systems [now] can create working data copies in seconds while dramatically decreasing overall storage requirements. This not only provides immediate cost savings, but also allows companies to accelerate their application test and development to bring their products to market much more quickly."

Topio software will enable users to consolidate all of their DR data onto a single NetApp platform and use that DR copy for such business applications as testing and reporting. This empowers customers to implement a tiered DR infrastructure for greater operational efficiencies.

The acquisition continues to expand the NetApp heterogeneous data protection portfolio.

Topio adds DR capabilities to existing disk-to-disk backup solutions from NetApp, which include NearStore VTL for heterogeneous data center backup, Open Systems SnapVault for remote office backup and SnapVault for NetBackup, a solution jointly engineered with Symantec and optimized for NetBackup in any storage environment.

Topio will also help enable NetApp to increase its presence in the data center with Fibre Channel SAN by helping accelerate migration of customers using legacy storage systems onto NetApp SAN storage systems.

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