Commvault Acquires Hedvig in $225M Deal

Commvault this week revealed it has acquired Hedvig for $225 million as part of an effort to strengthen its software-defined storage (SDS) portfolio.

Hedvig has been at the forefront of a developing a programmable protocol-agnostic approach to storage that turns multiple nodes based on commodity storage devices into a single pool of addressable storage. That approach can be applied to both legacy applications based virtual machines as well as emerging cloud-native applications based on containers.

Commvault is still evaluating how it will employ Hedvig software in future offerings, says Don Foster, vice president of storage solutions at Commvault. However, as the first acquisition Commvault has ever made in its history, the Hedvig deal, expected to close in the current third quarter, is part of an ongoing transformation of the venerable provider of storage systems, says Foster.

Emerging applications based on containers tend to rely heavily on scale-out storage to service workloads that frequently scale up and down. Those applications represent a small percentage of the workloads running in enterprise IT environments. However, as containerized applications that need to access persistent forms of storage start to be deployed in production environments, the Hedvig platform should give Commvault access to the core technology need to make data available to those applications.

“Hedvig works with Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and OpenShift,” says Foster.

Of course, Commvault is not the only storage vendor eyeing this opportunity. There’s a lot of interest in a container storage interface (CSI) effort being led by the team that develops Kubernetes that will make it simpler to attach external storage to Kubernetes clusters on which most containerized applications will run. While it may be a while before storage platforms are validated against that interface, the core technology work has already been done.

In the meantime, channel partners should take note that most modern applications are being built using containers. As such, it’s only a matter of time now before storage systems will have to be modernized as well.