NetApp has bought Talon Storage, a supplier of caching software that connects branch offices to file servers in the public cloud. Terms were undisclosed.
Talon, headquartered in New Jersey, was founded by CEO Shirish Phatak in 2010. It has offices in the Bay Area, the UK, Netherlands and India and claims more than 400 enterprise-class customers.
NetApp told us it “is retaining Talon team members responsible for the company’s product innovations and customer sales and support”.
Phatak said in a prepared statement: “We’re excited about the potential for our customers to be brought more completely into the NetApp customer family, with all of their resources and vision. This is a true ‘win-win’ for Talon’s stakeholders, employees, and customers, as both NetApp and Talon share a common vision for the power of the cloud as the consolidated repository for all types of unstructured data.”
Anthony Lye, head of NetApp’s cloud data services unit, also provided a quote: “We share the same vision as the team did at Talon – a unified footprint of unstructured data that all users access seamlessly, regardless of where in the world they are, as if all users and data were in the same physical location. And to do this without impacting workflow, user experience – and at a lower cost.”
NetApp’s got Talon
Talon’s FAST (file acceleration and storage-caching technology) is a VM-based caching appliance for remote and branch offices. This gets its data from a file server in the public cloud and enables ROBO sites to do without an on-premises file server. It supports NetApp cloud services such as Cloud Volumes OnTap in AWS, Cloud Volumes Service and Azure NetApp Files. The Google Cloud Platform is also supported.
NetApp and Talon say customers can seamlessly centralise data in the cloud while still maintaining a consistent branch office experience using Cloud Volumes combined with Talon FAST software. Branch offices won’t have an an on-premises NetApp filer, so Talon gives NetApp an indirect ROBO presence.
Talon FAST supports file and block protocols. The company said late last year it would add object storage protocol support Blocks & Files supposes that NetApp’s StorageGRID object storage product will now benefit from this.
Talon spotting
There is no recorded venture capital funding for Talon. Phatak had previously started Tacit Networks, a wide area file systems supplier, in 2000 and this was bought by WAN optimisation supplier Packeteer in May 2006 for $78m. He stayed at Packeteer for two years and then joined Bluecoat when this WAN application delivery company bought Packeteer for $268m in June 2008.
He left Bluecoat in 2010 and then, after starting up Talon, founded Velocious Networks in late 2011 to provide quality of service (QoS) technology for optimising application traffic across enterprise networks. Akamai bought the latter company in November 2013.
