Western Digital Amplifies Its Enterprise SSD Footprint With Skyera Acquisition

Western Digital's participation in the SSD market has been spotty at best. Nearly five-years-ago, the company produced a line of desktop SSDs - like so many other I/O vendors - but today, you'll only find a small hint of flash in a WD drive if you look to the hybrid Black². WD has instead used its subsidiary HGST to handle everything SSD, but with its major enterprise focus, no one would fault you if you were unaware that WD even dealt with SSDs at all.

Well, the enterprise is one area WD seems pretty content to stay in, and expand. Today, the company announced its acquisition of Skyera, a well-known player in the enterprise SSD game with its collection of dense-storage 1U units. With its next product, the skyEagle, the company says it will be able to cram a staggering 300TB into a 1U unit, or 10PB into an entire rack. Pretty mind-blowing storage, especially when you consider that it's flash, not mechanical storage.

Skyera's San Jose Headquarters

Now under its wing, WD is going to be integrating Skyera into HGST, making use of its current portfolio while also getting to work on future products. From the company's press release, "Western Digital and Skyera have had a long-term strategic partnership. By combining Skyera's innovative flash platform with HGST's leading solid-state storage solutions and flash virtualization software we plan to provide breakthrough value and capabilities to help customers transform their cloud and enterprise data center infrastructure".

We hope that'll be the case, and as a WD desktop fan, I can't help but hope that eventually, all of the company's efforts in the enterprise will somehow trickle down to the desktop.