Western Digital business coughs up $340 in cash for sTec, an early leader in the enterprise SSD market currently going through a negative shift in fortunes.
Once the acquisition closes the sTec engineering team and IP will be integrated into the HGST (former Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) SSD business, gaining WD a range of technologies ranging from flash and DRAM memory, SATA and PCIe SSDs, embedded SSDs, flash storage devices and flash storage and caching software.
HGST will also continue supporting existing sTec customers.
Solid state storage in the enterprise will play an increasingly strategic role in the future of Western Digital,” WD CEO Steve Milligan says. “This acquisition is one more building block in our strategy to capitalize on the dramatic changes within the storage industry by investing in SSDs and other high-growth storage products.”
sTec is not the first WD investment in enterprise SSDs-- on March 2013 WD poured cash in Skyera, a developer of flash storage applications using a combination of MLC-based flash technology and deduplication and compression technology to reduce the costs of flash-based storage.
