January 02, 2008, 9:22 AM — IBM has bought XIV, an Israeli manufacturer of SAN (storage
area network) equipment. XIV's main product is Nextra, a storage system based
on a grid of standard hardware components.
Nextra's self-healing, self-tuning and dynamic scaling capabilities will give
IBM new technology to address the growing requirement for high-performance storage
for digital archives, digital media and Web 2.0 applications, IBM said.
Around 4 petabytes (4 million gigabytes) of Nextra storage are already in service,
XIV said.
XIV employees will join IBM's system storage business unit, the companies said.
Moshe Yanai, chairman of XIV, previously worked at EMC.
The companies would not put a price on the deal, but reports in the Israeli
financial press earlier this week valued it at US$300 million to $350 million.
This is the latest in a line of storage-related acquisitions for IBM, which
recently bought Softek, FileNet and NovusCG to beef up its storage offering.
