Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

EMC Buys TwinStrata To Link VMAX Arrays To Clouds 

As part of the release of its VMAX3 release, EMC is acquiring cloud gateway startup TwinStrata. EMC said its new embedded cloud access would be delivered through TwinStrata's "cloud tiering" technology, called CloudArray.

TwinStrata is based in Natick, Massachusetts.  Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CloudArray allows customers to shift little-used data to the public cloud as a way to reduce infrastructure costs. In announcing the deal, EMC said TwinStrata supports many public cloud providers.

CloudArray was introduced in 2010, and TwinStrata said hundreds of customers have deployed it either as an extension or replacement for their existing storage infrastructure. The company's goal is changing "the economics, scale and agility of storage environments," CEO Nicos Vekiarides said in a blog post announcing the EMC deal.

As part of EMC, Vekiarides said TwinStrata would continue helping customers extend on-premise storage to public and private cloud providers. The integration of CloudArray with the VMAX3 enterprise platform is expected to provide automatic tiering of workloads, he added.

Among TwinStrata's current customers are the American Federation of Government Employees and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The cloud storage provider released version 4.5 of its CloudArray software in May incorporating a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service feature targeting VMware users.

CloudArray also provides access to data storage along with offsite data protection and disaster recovery.

According to the CrunchBase startup tracker, TwinStrata was launched as a privately held IT services provider in 2007. Among its early investors was Avalon Ventures, a fund that focuses on IT startups.

twinstrata-nicos

TwinStrata CEO Nicos Vekiarides

The company has raised $19.4 million in five funding rounds that included an $8 million investment by Avalon Ventures in October 2011. Some 27 unidentified backers reportedly kicked in an additional $5.7 million in August 2011, according to CrunchBase.

Vekiarides, who is TwinStrata's founder, is a data storage industry veteran who previously served as vice president of product strategy and technology at Incipient, which is credited with delivering the first storage virtualization solution embedded in a Cisco Systems switch fabric.

Before that, Vekiarides served as founding vice president of engineering at StorageApps. Prior to its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, he led a team credited with developing an early storage virtualization appliance. HP acquired StorageApps in 2001. Vekiarides also worked as a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s

Industry watchers praised the acquisition. "This is indeed an intriguing and smart move," ESG senior analyst Terri McClure noted in a blog post. "EMC VMAX embedding a gateway allows EMC to leverage its FAST tiering technology to add a cloud tier."

Observers had been anticipating a cloud gateway acquisition by EMC, but McClure said most believed a deal through EMC's cloud division was more likely.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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