IBM swallows Cleversafe in cloud push

IBM has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cleversafe, Inc., a developer and manufacturer of object-based storage software and appliances.

Founded in 2004, privately-owned Cleversafe has more than 350 patents in object-based, on-premise storage solutions that enable clients to scale up to exabytes of storage.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. They are down 10.8% over the last three months, versus a 6% decline for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This interoperability should make SoftLayer that much more attractive than its rival for customers interested in implementing that kind of hybrid operating model, but IBM still has an uphill battle to fight in the infrastructure-as-a-service space.

“Today a huge rare diversity is on-going as entities highly flip to the cloud for ingenious steps to regulate more advanced operations and enhancing amounts of records within a protect and impactful way”, Robert LeBlanc, chief vice chairman, IBM Cloud, said within a news broadcast discharge.

Barely two weeks after snapping up a low-key consultancy to help boost its struggling professional services division, IBM Corp.is making another strategic acquisition aimed at augmenting an even more important part of its business: The SoftLayer public cloud.

In addition to the object storage technology, the acquisition of Cleversafe will also add to IBM talents and a portfolio of existing customers.

Cleversale employs about 200 people. The Illinois, Chicago based company has partnered with other tech giants such as Lockheed Martin, HP and IBM itself in the past, and has raised a sum total of over $100 million. Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet) solutions enhance on-premise storage options for enterprises and service providers with low-priced, large scale active archives and unstructured data content stores.

Cleversafe’s technology differs from others in the cloud arena, as it stores files as single, complete objects rather than using algorithms to split data into smaller pieces and reassemble it as required.

“It slices up the data across multiple data centers”, said Baltazar. IBM has been steadily working on its hybrid cloud project for several years already. IDC says that the rise of data intensive cloud applications will give rise to demand for massive storage, which will in turn drive interest in object storage. IDC predicts the object storage market will reach $28 billion by 2018.