Western Digital Acquires Tegile Systems, Expanding Its Flash Storage Portfolio

After announcing the acquisition of cloud storage provider Upthere, Western Digital (WD) announced another acquisition this Tuesday – flash storage company Tegile Systems.

WD did not disclose the transaction amount. Founded in 2010, Tegile primarily provides flash and persistent memory storage solutions for data‑center applications. In recent years WD has acted as an investor and led a $33 million Series E round in April.

Through this acquisition, WD will obtain an innovative product portfolio and more than 1,700 new users, including major customers such as the U.S. Department of Defense and Bookings.com, and will inherit an experienced team of about 300 employees.

In the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for flash storage, Tegile was positioned as a Visionary, standing alongside independent AFA vendors and competing with leaders like IBM, NetApp, Dell‑EMC and HPE.

From a product capability perspective, Tegile, together with Kaminario, Huawei Dorado V3, Pure Storage and Nutanix HCI (NX‑9030), follows the NVMe AFA trend and has released its own NVMe SSD storage products. The Tegile IntelliFlash series includes hybrid, all‑flash and NVMe offerings.

Tegile launched two NVMe AFA models, the N5200 and N5800. According to promotional material, both are 2U, controller‑integrated appliances that can house up to 24 NVMe drives.

Both models support SAN and NAS services; the N5200 and N5800 support NVMe SSD capacities of 184 TB and 154 TB respectively, feature an active‑active dual‑controller architecture, and include inline deduplication and compression.

All Tegile storage arrays are built on the IntelliFlash OS, which provides rich software features and high performance. The software stack supports a variety of storage media, including DRAM, NVDIMM, NVMe, SAS, NAND flash and HDD.

IntelliCare, Tegile's cloud‑ops tool, collects usage, configuration, health and performance data from Tegile devices worldwide, analyzes the data via cloud‑based analytics servers, and provides customers with health assessments, trend forecasts and operational recommendations without requiring on‑premises software.

Beyond storage products, Tegile offers the IntelliStack converged‑infrastructure line, which integrates deeply with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and switches to deliver optimal NAS and SAN implementations for various applications.

Cisco's Nexus 5000 and MDS series FC switches provide strong support for Tegile arrays in FCoE mode. By enabling NPV (N‑port virtualization), the switches can act as N‑port nodes within Fibre Channel fabrics, allowing flexible networking.

Whenever a storage vendor is acquired, I like to reflect on the core technologies and products that existed before the deal. Compared with previous acquisitions, this announcement is brief, mainly due to heavy overtime, making it harder to find time. Although many vendors appear similar, each has distinct features and innovations that are worth revisiting.

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