NetApp to acquire Bycast

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. Founded more than 10 years ago, Bycast has helped more than 250 customers worldwide dramatically improve their operational efficiency and reduce the administrative burden of managing massive quantities of data across multiple geographies.

Bycast extends NetApp's leadership 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 greatly 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 even greater efficiencies across data centers 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.”

The acquisition is expected to close in May 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.