Hewlett-Packard is growing its scalable storage capabilities through the acquisition of storage software maker Ibrix.
The deal was announced July 17. Financial terms were not disclosed.
HP officials said the acquisition will bolster the company’s ability to offer scalable storage solutions to enterprises with large-scale, data-intensive application environments, where the task of storing huge amounts of user-generated data often can slow things down.
Adding the nine-year-old Ibrix to its storage mix will help HP address those concerns, according to Jeff Hausman, vice president of unified storage in HP’s StorageWorks Division.
“Customers need highly scalable storage solutions that efficiently and cost-effectively manage massive amounts of information,” Hausman said in a statement.
See how DreamWorks is using storage from HP, Ibrix and NetApp to make its magic.
The Ibrix purchase will expand HP’s storage capabilities in scale-out and high-performance computing environments, as well as in cloud computing and fixed content archiving.
That area of the storage business is growing at 20 percent a year, which is faster than the NAS (network-attached storage) and total external storage markets, according to HP.
Ibrix’s Fusion storage software can scale to tens of petabytes, and the management capabilities within the solution enables IT administrators to dynamically add capacity as needed.
HP already offers Ibrix’s software on its StorageWorks SANs (storage area networks), as well as on its ProLiant servers, BladeSystem blade servers and ProCurve Ethernet networking switches and management software.
HP expects to close the deal within 30 days. Ibrix currently has 53 employees and more than 175 enterprise customers.