WD Invests $10 Million in Amplidata

Amplidata NV, in object-based software defined storage software, announced that Western Digital Capital has made a $10 million strategic investment in the company.

HGST, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has selected Amplidata’s Himalaya software to jointly develop a family of ultra-dense storage solutions to address the growing demand to store data in public and private cloud data centers.

According to IDC, the digital universe is doubling in size every two years. The data created and copied annually in 2013 was 4.4ZB which is expected to grow to 44ZB by 2020. The companies will partner to create solutions that will improve the storage economics for the exabyte-scale needs of the world’s largest businesses and will be available in the market during the first half of 2015.

“We are extremely excited to have Western Digital Capital as a strategic partner and investor,” said Mike Wall, Amplidata chairman and CEO. “Businesses will be better equipped to face the enormous challenge to manage and leverage their data for competitive advantage by having it all on spinning disks. These new offerings will redefine the storage landscape yet again by allowing businesses to cost effectively keep all their data online.”

“The need to store more data over longer periods of time is driving demand for new forms of innovation in storage solutions. Whether it’s for regulatory compliance, historical analytics or long-tail content, organizations want more scalable and affordable ways to store data that requires online, active access,” said Dave Tang, SVP and GM, elastic storage platforms group, HGST. “By partnering with Amplidata, HGST aims to leverage our industry leading storage portfolio along with Amplidata’s powerful Himalaya object storage technology to enable breakthrough value and scalability for cloud data centers.”

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Founded in Lochristi, Belgium in 2008 and with an US HQs in Milpitas, CA, Amplidata has received now a total of $43 million in financial funding from Intel Capital, Quantum, Endeavour Vision, Swisscom Ventures, Hummingbird Ventures, and now Western Digital.

Last round was $10 million in March 2014 with Quantum once more participating.

That's the first time we learn that HDD and SSD maker HGST wants to be involved in solutions for cloud data centers.

Dave Tang, SVP and GM of the elastic storage platforms group at HGST since 2013, was strategic marketing consultant, SMB and cloud network services for Cisco Systems, and was in charge for one year of the NetApp's strategy in high performance file and block storage systems. He also worked in the past at Quantum, Seagate and Conner Peripherals.

Main competitors of Amplidata in object-based storage include Cleversafe, DataDirect Networks, EMC and Scality.