NetApp To Acquire Storage Optimization Firm Akorri

NetApp plans to acquire privately held Akorri Networks, a maker of software that helps companies use their storage capacity more efficiently in virtualized environments.

NetApp, which sells storage and data management software, said Wednesday that it expects to complete the all-cash transaction early in its fourth fiscal quarter, which ends in late April. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The acquisition is the latest example of the ongoing consolidation in the storage market, as vendors try to fill holes or extend their product portfolios to take better advantage of growing markets. Recent examples include Dell's $960 million acquisition of Compellent Technologies and Hewlett Packard's purchase of 3PAR for more than $2.3 billion.

NetApp's latest deal is less grand than Dell's and HP's, focusing on a much narrower portion of a product portfolio. NetApp plans to use the capabilities of Akorri's BalancePoint to extend the ability of the NetApp OnCommand system to help customers make better use of available storage in virtualized environments.

BalancePoint provides server-to-storage performance analysis to identify bottlenecks in physical and virtual environments. Being able to offer help in both is important because data centers are becoming a mixture of the two environments. While physical servers are still needed to run some business applications, companies are cutting hardware costs by running multiple applications in a single server through virtualization, which is also a major component in cloud computing. BalancePoint supports a wide variety of operating platforms and storage systems and also supports storage-area network switches from Brocade and Cisco and virtualization products from Microsoft and VMware.

"The ability to accurately predict and manage performance and capacity requirements has been a common obstacle for many customers wanting to transition to a virtualized environment," Manish Goel, executive VP of product operations for NetApp, said in a statement. "Akorri further strengthens NetApp's data management capabilities to achieve greater quality of service and performance in virtual and cloud environments.

Akorri, founded in 2005, is based in Littleton, Mass. Customers include Cambridge Trust, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Goodrich, Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Neiman Marcus, Crocs, and Abbott Laboratories.