HGST, the enterprise subsidiary of hard drive manufacturer Western Digital, has bought the American flash storage start-up Skyera.

The company develops storage arrays for the data center, including Skyhawk FS – the densest all-flash system on the market, packing up to 136TB of raw capacity into a 1U box. This technology will be integrated into HGST, to augment its existing flash storage product portfolio.

The exact details of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed, but The Register estimated that WD, which already owned a part of the company, paid something in the range of US$50 to $100 million.

Cheap and cheerful
Skyera was founded in 2010 by Radoslav Danilak and Rod Mullendore, who sold their previous storage business, SandForce, to WD’s main competitor Seagate.

The company uses Toshiba’s Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND chips – without the additional bulk associated with SSDs - to build high performance, extremely high density SkyHawk and SkyEagle arrays.

The lifecycle of consumer-grade memory is augmented by proprietary hardware controllers, RAID system and SeOS management software, which supports both block and file storage.

Following the precedent set by the likes of Pure Storage and Dell, Skyera claims it can offer ‘flash at the price of disk’ – however it says it achieves $3/GB price point before compression and deduplication algorithms have been applied, something that is rarely seen in the industry.

Western Digital and Dell have previously invested more than $51 million into the company. Now, almost two years after its Series B funding round, WD has decided to buy Skyera outright, to get its hands on both intellectual property and engineering talent.

WD already offers the broadest storage device portfolio in the industry, and it hopes that the acquisition will help it find new opportunities in the data center.

"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," said Mike Cordano, president of HGST.