Data Backup Digest

While it may not be one of the most familiar names in the industry, HGST, formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital since 2003. Based out of San Jose, California, HGST boasts a worldwide customer base that relies on their hard drives, solid-state drives and storage-related services on a daily basis. As such, it should come as no surprise that the team with HGST is making moves in an effort to gain a larger share of the data storage market.

HGST recently made headlines through the acquisition of Amplidata – a popular object storage software developer. Amplidata’s flagship product, Himalaya, enables the use of scale-out, software-defined storage architecture. Having built a reputation based on the ease-of-use, efficiency and reliability of Himalaya, Amplidata already maintains a strong presence in the industry.

In fact, this isn’t even the first venture between HGST and Amplidata. A previous partner in HGST’s Active Archive framework, Amplidata is already familiar with the expert team at HGST and Western Digital. Their earlier partnership was focused on reducing costs and bolstering the efficiency of today’s modern hard drives.

Steve Milligan, president and CEO with Western Digital, spoke about his company’s relationship with the team at Amplidata. He was quoted as saying: “We have had an ongoing strategic relationship with Amplidata that included investment from Western Digital Capital and subsequent joint development activity. Amplidata has deep technical expertise, an innovative spirit, and valuable intellectual property in this fast-growing market space. The acquisition will support our strategic growth initiatives and broaden the scope of opportunity for HGST in cloud data center storage infrastructure.”

Mike Cordano, president with HGST, shared his thoughts on the ever-evolving IT industry. He was quoted as saying: “As the evolution of architectures and business models continues to take shape in the storage industry, HGST is uniquely positioned to drive innovation and lead a transformation of the data center in the Third Platform. For applications requiring massive, peta-scale capacities, software is essential to providing scalability, resiliency and efficiency. Amplidata is a leader in software defined storage technology for these scale-out systems and together we will accelerate development of the Active Archive platform to meet the demands of our data-centric world.”

Other Partnerships

Amplidata has benefitted from a number of other industry partnerships, as well. Their proprietary AmpliStor XT platform was integrated directly into StorNext; Quantum’s line of services and resources meant for data management and tiered data storage. As such, they’ve been able to heighten their own visibility to unprecedented levels.

John Gacek, president and CEO of Quantum, spoke highly about Amplidata in a recent interview, where he said: “Amplidata's technology is a key building block in Lattus, our StorNext-managed private cloud archive, providing unparalleled performance for high-speed data access in a massively scalable and highly cost-effective solution. As both an Amplidata strategic partner and investor, we're excited about the acquisition. It reinforces the value of our solution, and we believe it will result in new strategic partnership opportunities.”