HP storage scales up with Ibrix buy

HP has agreed to purchase a storage company called Ibrix that builds file serving software for extreme scale-out, cloud and high-performance computing environments.

Ibrix was founded in 2000 in Billerica, Mass. and has 53 employees. Ibrix has been business partner of HP’s for the past three years and its software is already available with HP’s StorageWorks SAN, ProLiant servers, BladeSystem servers, and ProCurve Ethernet switches and management software, HP said Friday.

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Ibrix’s main product is Fusion, a parallel file system designed for strong data protection and high availability. Ibrix’s Web site boasts features such as the ability to “build file systems that can scale capacity up to tens of petabytes in a single global namespace; provide tens of gigabytes per second of bandwidth and millions of IOPs [input/output operations per second] of aggregate performance; [and] scale bandwidth and storage capacity independently and non-disruptively.”

The software’s current design is vendor-neutral, allowing installation on any server, connected to any storage device. HP said the Ibrix technology will be integrated into HP’s StorageWorks division after the acquisition is closed, which is expected to happen within 30 days.

“With scalability to tens of petabytes, customers can gain control of exploding data growth and address application performance challenges in the most demanding environments,” HP said. “The advanced data management capability of IBRIX’s Fusion software suite also allows customers to seamlessly add capacity as their data or performance needs grow.”
Ibrix CEO Milan Shetti said the combination of Ibrix’s file serving software with HP’s products and services will “enable customers to lower the cost of scale-out architectures while easing the process of storing, accessing and moving critical data."

Ibrix has 175 customers in various industries such as financial services, oil and gas, life sciences and the media.
HP did not release financial details of the acquisition. HP’s Ibrix deal comes less than two weeks after storage rival EMC bolstered its de-duplication abilities by agreeing to purchase Data Domain.