Storage acquisitions abound, funding frees up

IBM acquires Bus-Tech, Quest snaps up Bakbone Software

Developments of the week in storage

Last week Wednesday, EMC acquired Bus-Tech, a vendor whose appliances allow mainframe data to be stored on open systems storage. The company, who has been an EMC partner for several years, makes the Mainframe Data Library, a virtual tape library controller for IBM and Unisys mainframes that replaces mainframe tape infrastructures with open systems storage. 

Tech industry's M&As in 2010 

The appliances have ESCON and FICON connections and work with IBM z/OS, MVS, VSE and VM. According to EMC, IDC has estimated that mainframe VTL revenue is $2.5 billion from now to 2014.

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Last week Wednesday, EMC acquired Bus-Tech, a vendor whose appliances allow mainframe data to be stored on open systems storage. The company, who has been an EMC partner for several years, makes the Mainframe Data Library, a virtual tape library controller for IBM and Unisys mainframes that replaces mainframe tape infrastructures with open systems storage. 

Tech industry's M&As in 2010 

The appliances have ESCON and FICON connections and work with IBM z/OS, MVS, VSE and VM. According to EMC, IDC has estimated that mainframe VTL revenue is $2.5 billion from now to 2014.

Quest Software also acquired BakBone Software last week. BakBone offers continuous data protection, replication, deduplication and traditional disk- and tape-based backup and recovery software. Quest will add BakBone's products to its vRanger Pro, LiteSpeed for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, Recovery Manager for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and SharePlex for Oracle product portfolio. The company offered $55 million for Bakbone. Quest Software has been on an acquisition tear, including Aelita in 2004, Imceda Software in 2005, Vizioncore and ScriptLogic in 2007, NetPro in 2008, MonoSphere in 2009 and Surgient this year.

On the funding front, Zetta Systems picked up $11.5 million from Foundation Capital and Sigma Partners, bringing its total funding to $22.5 million. The company also recently named Ali Jenab as CEO, replacing Jeff Truehaft, a co-founder of Zetta Systems. Zetta provides a cloud-based storage service.

Gluster, a vendor of open source scale-out storage, raised $8.5 million in Series B funding from Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.