On June 8, 2014, TwinStrata announced that EMC has agreed to acquire them. No financial details were disclosed, and EMC does not have a press release on its website announcing the agreement.

According to Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata, EMC decided to buy TwinStrata because EMC wanted to:

integrate CloudArray into the new VMAX3 enterprise data service platform to allow [customers] to automatically tier workloads even more seamlessly for off-premise storage capacity expansion, data protection and disaster recovery. 

Neuralytix has a positive opinion of TwinStrata’s strategy and CloudArray product. CloudArray enables customers to create hybrid clouds across geographically dispersed regions; but most importantly, it enables on-premise, private clouds to integrate seamlessly with public cloud providers including Amazon AWS, EMC Atmos, Google Cloud Storage, HP Cloud Services, OpenStack, and Rackspace.

We believe EMC’s acquisition of TwinStrata is strategically important for EMC. It gives EMC an on-ramp into public cloud service providers, while being able to protect the investments of its existing install base. Accepting Mr. Vekiarides’ comments on face value, it makes a lot of sense for EMC to fully integrate the CloudArray into the new VMAX3.

Assuming that EMC will integrate TwinStrata into the VMAX (and VNX in the future), and assuming NetApp intends on releasing the rumored Cloud ONTAP some time this year, Neuralytix believes that EMC has once again “one-upped” NetApp on the private/public cloud storage stage. The EMC approach does not provide the same level of functionality as the expected NetApp’s cloud strategy. EMC does provide the better solution to protecting the existing investments made by the install base. Finally, Neuralytix also believes that the EMC approach (at least based on confirmed data), is likely to be more cost effective than the NetApp approach.

Outside the EMC versus NetApp comparison, Neuralytix does not believe that other competitors come close to the completeness of execution demonstrated by EMC.

Source: TwinStrata