Quantum to Acquire Western Digital’s ActiveScale Business

Quantum has announced that it had agreed to acquire ActiveScale object storage business from Western Digital. Western Digital’s ActiveScale cloud storage solutions are used to store unstructured data that requires massive amount of scalable storage space that is cheap, fast, and reliable. ActiveScale has not been growing at Western Digital for a while now, but it will fit quite well into Quantum’s portfolio sitting between high-performance SSD and HDD-powered storage systems and low-cost tape-based storage systems.

Today’s ActiveScale systems can store up to 57.55 PB of data that is protected using technologies like erasure coding, BitSpread, and BitDynamics. Performance wise, ActiveScale can offer up to 75 GB/s throughput in a scale-out configuration. Western Digital has been getting rid of its storage systems business for some time now as competing against such storage systems giants as Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, NetApp, and Hitachi that control over 50% of the market (according to IDC) is very hard these days. Last year the company sold off its IntelliFlash all-flash storage arrays business to DDN and said it would consider various strategic options for its ActiveScale business.

As it now transpires, Western Digital will sell its ActiveScale division to Quantum for an undisclosed sum. Quantum expects to close the transaction by March 31, 2020.

Quantum will continue to support existing ActiveScale customers and devices, though the company stresses that it acquires ActiveScale mostly because of software, technologies, and specialists. The company’s future plans include creation of object storage solutions featuring HDDs and tape.

Jamie Lerner, President and CEO, Quantum, said the following:

"As Quantum returns to a growth path, we will be evaluating strategic acquisitions that bolster our technology portfolio. Object storage software is an obvious fit with our strategy, our go-to-market focus, and within our technology portfolio. We are committed to the product, and to making ActiveScale customers successful, and we look forward to engaging with them to solve their most pressing business challenges around storing and managing unstructured data. With the addition of the engineers and scientists that developed the erasure-coded object store software, we can deliver on a robust technical roadmap, including new solutions like an object store built on a combination of disk and tape."

Related Reading:

• Western Digital to Exit Storage Systems: Sells Off IntelliFlash Division
• Western Digital Roadmap Updates: Energy Assisted Recording, Multi-Stage Actuators, Zoned Storage
• Fire At Kioxia & Western Digital NAND Fab - Impact on Supply to be Minimal

Source: Quantum