EMC to acquire Isilon

It grew hot, then cold, and now, it's ON. EMC is acquiring Isilon for USD2.25 billion.

It is a good buy because EMC is desperately looking for a strong contender in the NAS space. I have worked on EMC's Celerra for 2 years. The DART OS is pretty good but not as good as I want it to be. The Celerra Manager GUI was obsolete looking and the CLI through the Control Station (remember server_2, server_3?) was unelegant.

Furthermore they have not done well with the Ibrix partnership.

Therefore, it was unable to compete with the NAS giants like NetApp. Isilon on the other hand, has been giving NetApp a run for their money. Their OneFS is what NetApp wanted from their Spinnaker acquisition with ONTAP GX. It has been many years and we hope with ONTAP 8.1, NetApp scale-out NAS story will finally jive.

Back to Isilon. EMC has made a good buy. Isilon is the up-and-coming star of the scale-out NAS arena and kicking up plenty of dust. And EMC has a good history of making many of their acquisitions work well into the solutions ecosystem. Just look at VMware, Data Domain, Avamar, RSA. These are pretty decent stars in the EMC's universe. Let's hope EMC can make Isilon a big star as well.

So EMC and Isilon? It's a good deal. Let's wait and see how this pans out.