EMC Acquires Cloud Support Vendor FastScale
EMC has acquired FastScale Technology, a vendor of software for data centers, in an effort to focus on supporting private cloud infrastructures, the company announced Monday. — With the acquisition, EMC will focus on increasing the performance …
Context & Ripple Effects
The FastScale deal slots into a deliberate 2009 push by EMC to sell the whole private-cloud stack rather than arrays alone: four months earlier the company launched the VMax array with VMware integration first and Hyper-V later, built on a new Virtual Matrix Architecture that broke from its own DMX-4 line. FastScale adds a data center software layer on top of that hardware story.
The move also follows the template Dell set when it paid $1.4 billion for EqualLogic in late 2007 — large storage incumbents buying their way into virtualization-era capabilities instead of building them.
First-order effects
- FastScale's data-center software customers become EMC accounts, and EMC gains an optimization toolset to attach to VMax deployments aimed at VMware-based private clouds.
- EMC's sales pitch shifts from selling capacity toward selling performance tuning and support for customers' internal cloud builds.
Second-order effects
- Rivals like Dell and HP face pressure to match EMC with comparable data-center management software bundles, continuing the consolidation race that EqualLogic started.
- Independent data-center efficiency vendors lose independence as acquirers — smaller specialists either get absorbed or must align tightly with one hypervisor ecosystem to stay relevant.
Third-order effects
- If capability acquisitions keep substituting for internal development, enterprise storage consolidates around integrated private-cloud platforms — hardware plus management software plus support — squeezing standalone toolmakers out of the middle.
- The pattern reinforces hypervisor-centric buying: vendors sequence their offerings around VMware first, as both VMax and this acquisition do, giving VMware's ecosystem growing leverage over the storage market's roadmap.
The trend: Enterprise storage vendors are assembling private-cloud stacks through capability acquisitions, folding specialist data-center software into integrated hardware-plus-support platforms.