On March 3, 2015, HGST announced that it would complete an acquisition of Amplidata by the end of the first quarter of 2015. No financial information was disclosed.
Neuralytix believes that this move is very positive for HGST and Western Digital. Last November, Seagate announced its Kinetic drive, an Ethernet-connected object capable disk drive. Since then, both Western Digital and HGST have been lacking a solution in the object storage space.
Amplidata was named a Promising vendor in Neuralytix’s recent Object Storage iQ. This makes Amplidata one of several vendors to challenge the current Visionary vendors – China Telecom and EMC. Neuralytix further believes that the resources and the software focus of HGST will enable an accelerated development and maturity of Amplidata’s Himalya solutions. (Amplidata’s technology currently underpins Quantum’s Lattus and StorNext solutions).
What does that mean for HGST, Western Digital and the object storage industry at large? The answer is simple. Neuralytix believes between now and 2020, there will be further consolidation of vendors. This is optimal for a highly fragmented market that has yet to finalize on a consistent standard of data interchange. This lack of standardization (with the exception of Amazon’s S3 interface) makes it very hard for customers to move and use data across disparate data sets and storage silos.
In our Neuralytix Object Storage iQ (the full report is available directly from Neuralytix – please email [email protected]), we noted that Amplidata, as a vendor had many of the desired features and functions Neuralytix believes is critical for the long term success of an object vendor. The only exception is the heavy reliance Amplidata has on partners for some of its integration and data ingest capabilities.
In our opinion, Neuralytix believes that HGST is now well positioned with its portfolio of technology, albeit somewhat later to market than Seagate. It now as the necessary technologies to provide its OEMs with an enriched data storage solutions, that allows its OEMs to focus on data management, integration, and advanced data services.