14 DAY TRIAL // Determined to stay ahead of the times and competing firms, Western Digital has finalized an acquisition deal with sTec, a company that specializes in enterprise solid-state drives.
Western Digital has been one of the two prime suppliers of storage devices for decades, and now that the market is moving from hard disk drives (HDDs) to solid-state drives (SSDs), it is enforcing measures that will help it adapt.
One such measure is the total acquisition of the company we have mentioned before, adding all its innovations to its own portfolio.
WD won't exactly assimilate it into itself, however. Instead, sTec will become part of HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, but now an owned subsidiary of WD.
HGST has recently bought VeloBit as well, a company that makes advanced SSD caching software.
For those unaware, SSD caching is a method by which a motherboard/PC reads a solid-state drive and a separate HDD as being a single device.
That way, a storage partition in windows combines the high speed of NAND Flash storage (SSD) with the considerable capacity of magnetic platters (HDD).
With sTec's technological acumen added to the mix, and the likely inclusion of Virident further down the line (server-side flash storage expert), Western Digital, through HGST, it building up its solid-state technological acumen quite well.
"We are excited to welcome the sTec team to HGST, where they will play a key role in our ongoing growth," said Mike Cordano, president, HGST.
"sTec has a strong technology capability and foundational intellectual property that will support our initiative to deliver intelligent storage devices tailored to meet the evolving needs of today's datacenter customer."
If things go well, HGST's revenue in the enterprise SSD field will grow as IDC predicts, from $2.5B / €1,88B to $7B / €5.28 between 2013 and 2017.