Dell to Acquire Force10 Networks for Undisclosed Amount

After Intel acquired Fulcrum Microsystems earlier this week, it's now time for Dell to consolidate its position in the datacenter market with the purchase of Force10 (formerly nCore Networks), a company specialized in developing and selling network infrastructure equipment.

This includes 10 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing solutions and the company's client list sports important names such as Facebook, Zynga, Yahoo! and Sega, to name just a few.

“We are excited to work with Dell. Combining Dell’s global scale, reach and enterprise portfolio with our innovation in high-performance networking provides our customers the best end-to-end solution for today’s and tomorrow’s data centers,” said Henry Wasik, chief executive officer, Force10 Networks.

Dell and Force10 have had a successful partnership for more than six years, so the acquisition is a logical step for the Austin-based company, which is seeking to expand its range of datacenter products and solutions to include an integrated stack of server, storage, networking and services.

“Today’s datacenter networks are too complex and require too much manual intervention. What worked in the past is no longer viable in the virtual era,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell.

“Dell’s approach of offering customers open, capable and affordable solutions aligns with Force10’s approach to offering customers new levels of flexibility, performance, scale and automation which is fundamental to changing the economics of datacenter networking,” concluded the company's rep.

Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction was approved by the board of directors of each company, is subject to customary conditions and is expected to close in late summer.

According to Intel's findings, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networks are one of the fastest-growing market segments in the data center today and the increased demand requires new solutions that support evolving cloud architectures.