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HDS Joins M&A Game: Page 2 of 4

“I look at this more as an Hitachi storage group acquisition,” says John Mansfield, VP of product management for HDS. “We’ve done acquisitions before.”

He pointed to Hitachi’s 2003 merger with IBM Storage Technology Business to form hard drive vendor Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), and HDS’s pickup of SRM startup Comstock in 2002. (See Hitachi Pulls a Soft One.)

Okay, that’s a track record of three acquisitions in five years, counting Archivas.

Don’t expect the Archivas deal to open floodgates, but we might see a trickle. The two companies HDS has bought since 2002 have already been partners: Archivas had an OEM deal with HDS, and Comstock developed SRM almost exclusively for Hitachi's hardware platforms.

So it should be no surprise if HDS goes after BlueArc if the two firms' recent NAS OEM deal works out. (See HDS, BlueArc in Big NAS Deal.) And the storage world is still waiting for HDS to buy Sun’s old Pirus business unit and use the technology to add thin provisioning to its storage arrays. (See HDS PrepsTagmaStore, Ponders Sun.)