Riverbed has been trying to find its focus for several years. As part of this process, the vendor is now selling off its SteelStore product line to NetApp for $80 million.
Originally known as Whitewater, SteelStore provides network acceleration for data center storage. Riverbed debuted the Whitewater technology back in November 2010, promising to accelerate storage in the cloud era. Whitewater was further expanded with multiple updates over the years, including a focus on SMBs as well as enterprise customers.
Riverbed has been struggling in 2014 and earlier this month announced a restructuring plan for its operations.
Riverbed spokesperson Shawn Dainas said that a possible deal had been in the works for a little while on the SteelStore/Whitewater product line. Dainas added that it is a good transaction for Riverbed and NetApp.
“The decision to divest the SteelStore business reflects Riverbed’s commitment to focus on businesses and opportunities which both leverage our core competencies and allow us to deliver the best solutions in the application performance infrastructure market,” Dainas said. “We believe NetApp, a leader in the data management and storage space, is better positioned to fully realize the long-term growth potential for SteelStore.”
The fact that Riverbed is exiting its SteelStore business does not mean that Riverbed is entirely out of the storage acceleration business. Dainas noted that Riverbed continues to be committed to acceleration as it relates to storage technologies.
Riverbed’s flagship SteelHead WAN optimization technology can add value for storage replication traffic between data centers for disaster recovery purposes.
Dainas commented that the SteelFusion technology is also a solid offering in the storage space. Riverbed rebranded its Granite network acceleration technology as SteelFusion in April of this year. A key part of SteelFusion is the BlockStream technology.
“BlockStream is a Riverbed-exclusive storage delivery technology that enables branch data to be stored centrally in a secure data center and projected out to remote and branch locations for local-speed performance,” Dainas said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
