Irvine-based disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. acquired a Silicon Valley company for $685 million in a move to boost its enterprise and cloud offerings for corporate customers.
The cash buy for Virident Systems Inc., which makes flash-storage products targeting data centers and servers for virtualization, database, cloud computing and online applications, is expected to close later this year. The acquisition will fall under the umbrella of Western Digital’s Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Ltd. unit, which the company acquired last year for $4.3 billion.
The buy is expected to strengthen Western Digital’s position in enterprise solid-state drives, a segment that’s pegged to grow from $2.5 billion in 2012 to $7 billion by 2017, according to Framingham, Mass.-based market researcher International Data Corp.
Solid-state drives use chips to store data and are expected to gradually replace hard drives, which use spinning disks, in a variety of corporate settings.
—Chris Casacchia
