NetApp To Acquire Bycast

NetApp has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bycast, a privately-held company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in an all-cash transaction.

Bycast is a developer of object-based storage software designed to manage petabyte-scale, globally distributed repositories of images, video, and records for enterprises and service providers. Customers whose business depends on access to critical data across geographically distributed locations rely on Bycast to better share and retain content anywhere, any time to quickly respond to their changing business requirements.

Bycast extends NetApp’s position in unified storage by adding an object-based storage software offering. Object-based storage is a new and emerging approach to storing and accessing data based on object names and rich metadata that describes the content in greater detail, which simplifies the task of large-scale object storage while improving the ability to quickly search and locate data objects.

For example, a media company can use an object-based storage solution to provide its graphic artists around the world with the ability to simultaneously access data and collaborate on common projects. Object-based storage interfaces simplify the administration of the storage used for this purpose. With the acquisition of Bycast, NetApp broadens its capabilities in serving key verticals such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers and helps customers create better efficiencies across data centres around the globe.

“Bycast extends our unified storage strategy and enhances our solution for shared storage infrastructure by adding new capabilities for global data access and mobility,” said Manish Goel, Executive Vice President, Product Operations, NetApp. “The addition of Bycast’s products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings.”

“We are excited and look forward to joining the NetApp team,” said Moe Kermani, CEO of Bycast. “We share a complementary vision and a common dedication to excellence. Together, we will offer customers the best-in-class content repository solutions that further their drive toward a unified storage infrastructure.”