Seven Group

HP to Purchase IBRIX

Just when I thought the spring M&A frenzy was shaking out with EMC winning the Data Domain bidding war and Emulex fighting off Broadcom's advances HP announced this morning that they're buying cluster file system and scale-out NAS vendor IBRIX for an undisclosed sum. HP now has multiple scale-out solutions since they bought Windows scale-out specialist Polyserve in 2007.

IBRIX has had good traction in the entertainment, high performance computing and oil and gas industries which frequently have huge sets of unstructured data and very high performance requirements selling to 175 customers in these demanding markets. These industries, along with research oriented life sciences organizations, tend to be more adventurous willing to integrate a software solution like IBRIX Fusion with hardware from a IBRIX partner like HP or Dell.

In the entertainment industry Disney and Dreamworks have used IBRIX for special effects and CGI heavy files including Monsters vs. Aliens.

IBRIX solutions scale to 100s of petabytes and over 1TB/s throughput across hundreds of nodes with local or SAN storage. Unlike some clustered file systems Fusion doesn't use dedicated metadata nodes instead distributing metadata across the cluster to avoid bottlenecks.

IBRIX has in these markets been competing with Isilon, Panassas, Exanet and NetApp's ONTAP GX all of whom produce integrated hardware/software solutions. As scale-out NAS goes mainstream it has to attract less adventurous customers in industries like financial services who would prefer to have the metaphorical "one throat to choke" in an integrated solution.

While the purchase price hasn't been disclosed; IBRIX raised about $50 million in its 9 year life and was on the cusp of profitability before the credit crunch settled in so we can assume HP made the various vulture capitalists a few dollars and is forking over something north of $70 million.

In the conference call HP indicated that IBRIX would join HP's Unified storage group which is part of the StorageWorks operation. When asked what this means for Polyserve they were as expected non-committal but indicated that Polyserve was selling well for SQL Server and other structured data applications. I expect they'll keep it around for the Windows centric customers as well.

The big question is will HP keep selling IBRIX Fusion as a software product or like Lefthand's SANIQ will it become an option for HP servers leaving the propeller heads that built arrays of SuperMicro or Dell servers running Fusion searching for a new solution?

So does scale out trump scale up in the NAS market? Will we all be running clusters of devices or is there a future for the BlueArcs and high end NetApps?

http://www.byteandswitch.com/storage/infrastructure/hp-snaps-up-ibrix.php