Cloud Computing: EMC Reportedly After Flash Storage Start-Up XtremIO
April 24, 2012
EMC is reportedly hot to buy three-year-old Israeli flash storage start-up XtremIO.
According to Globes on Sunday, EMC is dangling $400 million-$450 million in front of its quarry and closing in for the kill.
Supposedly EMC rivals including NetApp have also been after XtremIO.
One of XtremIO’s founders previously sold Rainfinity to EMC and there are other family ties. XtremIO’s CFO Robin Ren was once director of R&D at EMC subsidiary VMware.
Globes says EMC CEO Joe Tucci, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod and VMware finance VP David Golden have all been in Israel. NetApp’s M&A guy and its EMEA VP also made the pilgrimage, but EMC usually brings a bigger checkbook to such affairs as NetApp can testify…
EMC is writing it all off as "industry speculation."
XtremIO has raised $25 million in two rounds from investors like Jerusalem Venture Partners and Giza Venture Capital, each of which reportedly owns 20%-30% of the joint. You do the math.
Other investors are identified as Battery Ventures and Lightspeed.
XtremIO hasn’t sold anything yet; it’s still in beta with a purely flash-based scale-out array with peer-to-peer nodes that could be used for desktop and server virtualization, database consolidation and HPC.
Bets are down on an announcement at EMC World in a month.