EMC Buys ScaleIO

EMC has announced that it is acquiring a startup called ScaleIO. ScaleIO’s flagship product is Elastic Converged Storage (ECS), which is software that pools flash-based storage.

Enterprise Storage Forum’s Pedro Hernandez reported, “EMC today revealed that it is indeed acquiring ScaleIO, a software startup with offices in Palo Alto Calif. and Israel. ScaleIO specializes in storage software, called Elastic Converged Storage (ECS), that pools server-side storage, namely solid-state drives (SSDs), flash PCIe caching cards and hard drives and presents, and presents it as a virtual SAN to the network.”

Jeffrey Burt with eWeek explained, “ScaleIO’s ECS can scale to thousands of nodes, with the performance scaling with the number of application servers and disks, according to company officials. Servers and capacity can be added, moved or removed on demand during I/O operations, they said. The software supports most Linux distributions and virtualization hypervisors, and works with any SSD, HDD and network. It will work in both virtualized and nonvirtualized environments.”

The Register’s Chris Mellor noted, “EMC states: ‘ScaleIO accelerates EMC’s strategy to deliver Flash across the entire server and storage infrastructure.’ To that end ScaleIO will become part of EMC’s flash product division, and the ECS software will be included in the XtremSW suite which is directed at server-installed PCIe flash cards; what was initially called VFCache.”

CRN’s Joseph F. Kovar observed, “While EMC declined to discuss the terms of the acquisition, speculation last month in the Israeli press was that EMC planned to pay between $200 million and $300 million for Israel-based ScaleIO.”