StorCentric Acquisition Game Plan Now Includes Violin Systems

StorCentric continues to build out with its fifth acquisition, Violin Systems. The purchase, announced on Thursday, expands StorCentric’s all-flash offerings. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Violin Systems is a private company founded in 2005 as Violin Technologies. It acquired the storage business of X-IO in October 2018 after emerging from bankruptcy in April 2017. At that time, Violin was purchased by Quantum Partners, a private investment fund.

StorCentric’s Mihir Shah

“Our vision at StorCentric is to offer a complete portfolio of data management technologies that support growing enterprises’ needs,” said Mihir Shah, StorCentric CEO. “Violin fits perfectly into our solutions road map, a mid-point between our Nexsan and Vexata all-flash offerings. As a prominent name in the all-flash array market, we aim to build on its track record of innovation.”

StorCentric is a technology holding company. Nexsan, an enterprise storage vendor, was one of the first StorCentric acquisitions. In August 2018, the company acquired both Nexsan and Drobo. These purchases were followed by Retrospect in June 2019 and most recently Vexata, in July 2019. In fact, Shah, CEO of StorCentric, was the CEO of Drobo.

With the Vexata acquisition, StorCentric gained enterprise-grade NVMe flash for its portfolio — a first for the company.

About Violin

Today, Violin’s storage architecture is software based with standard x86 servers and SSDs. Violin’s acquisition of X-IO technologies added space efficiency with de-duplication and proactive monitoring. This technology is now part of Violin’s offerings,

At the time of Violin’s acquisition of X-IO storage, the company said that it would add X-IO ISE arrays to its flash storage product lineup. The reason was to meet the needs of a variety of customers and provide them with solutions that span from terabytes to multiple petabytes with enterprise-class performance, features, and reliability. At the same time, Violin would integrate its extreme performance technology with X-IO.

What’s in the deal for customers?

Violin Systems’ Todd Oseth

“The acquisition provides Violin customers with streamlined access to a robust portfolio of data management solutions, backed by StorCentric’s world-class support organization,” said Todd Oseth, president and CEO at Violin Systems  “StorCentric’s customers will benefit from the availability of Violin’s all-flash NVMe product for their demanding performance-critical applications at a highly competitive price point.”

Moving forward, StorCentric will continue to invest in Violin’s pioneering all-flash technology development. The goal is to achieve product offerings that align with customers’ changing needs from traditional workloads, to emerging AI/ML environments, to shifting IT operational models.

To ensure a seamless integration, day-to-day sales contacts, operations and customer support at Violin will remain intact, the company said.