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HDS Joins M&A Game

4:40 PM -- Its hard to be surprised by any storage acquisition these days, unless Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is involved.

HDS stayed on the sidelines the past few years during storage’s M&A mania, until picking up archiving software startup Archivas today. (See Hitachi Pockets Archivas.) So is HDS changing its stance on acquisitions, or was Archivas just too good to pass up?

Archivas gives HDS the opportunity to make inroads in a market that is growing because of retention and compliance needs. It also provides a chance to dig into archrival EMC’s commanding share of that market.

Even before they started partnering with Archivas last year, HDS execs made it clear they considered Archivas’s open software superior to EMC’s proprietary content addressable storage (CAS) approach. (See Hitachi Heads for the Archives.) Today, they repeated how Archivas gives them a chance to crash the CAS party that EMC has had almost to itself for four years.

But they wouldn’t go much further on their acquisition strategy. They won’t even admit that HDS has been a reluctant acquirer.

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