Network Completes Topio Snap-up
Network Completes Topio Snap-up
December 11, 2006: Network Appliance has completed its acquisition of Topio with a total of $US 160 million forked out for the all-cash transaction.
Network says their powerful new vendor combo will deliver an expanded heterogeneous data-protection platform to customers. Topio is typically known for its software solutions that offer replication, recovery and protection for data regardless of the server or storage infrastructure.
For NetApp, their latest purchase will allow them to broaden their data-protection portfolio by using Topio to allow customers to simplify data replication from alternate storage arrays to NetApp storage systems.
It’s a move that could well open up doors to welcome in customers for NetApp storage solutions. By utilising Topio solutions to allow customer to smoothly replicate data from non NetApp storage infrastructure to a NetApp system, NetApp could soon find themselves entertaining a new crowd.
The Topio technology will also allow NetApp to push their tiered storage platform. For customers with mixed legacy storage environments, NetApp says they will now be able to unify their disaster recovery environment - on NetApp tiered storage platforms.
Jay Kidd, general manager for the emerging products group of NetApp, explains the benefits of the new partnership by pointing to customers overwhelmed by storage requirements and still using legacy systems. “With the addition of Topio, enterprises using legacy storage systems can create working data copies in seconds while dramatically decreasing overall storage requirements,” he says.
The Topio purchase builds on NetApp’s recent shopping spree of data protection vendors including NearStore VTL, Open System SnapVault and SnapVault for NetBackup. With operations and research to continue out of Israel, Topio will provide a new Data Replication business unit under the NetApp umbrella.