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HP to Buy Storage Virtualization Company

Hewlett-Packard Co. bought storage company StorageApps Wednesday in a stock-for-stock deal valued at $350 million.

StorageApps sells Storage Area Network (SAN) appliances, storage subsystems and SAN monitoring software.

HP says the acquisition rounds out its Federated Storage Management (FSAM) strategy by bringing storage virtualization into the mix.

StorageApps' SANLink sells as an appliance for connecting heterogeneous servers and storage. Supported operating system platforms for connected servers include Windows, Linux and several flavors of Unix. Supported storage cabinets include StorageApps' own subsystem, as well as subsystems from Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, Dell and LSI Logic. HP resells Hitachi storage hardware.

The systems also support several networking technologies including SCSI, Fibre Channel and Ethernet.

StorageApps sells a SAN monitoring software package under the name SANMaster. That package comes in a standard version and a Web-based portal version.

SANLink hit the market last June and the company inked an OEM deal with Dell Computer Corp. early on for the appliances. In May of this year, Gartner's Dataquest market research unit ranked StorageApps second after Veritas in storage virtualization software revenues on the Windows NT platform for the year 2000. Gartner found Veritas had 47 percent of the market, StorageApps had 32 percent and DataCore had 21 percent.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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