Twitter Doubles Down on Data Center Upgrades with DriveScale Acquisition

Twitter has acquired cloud infrastructure solutions provider DriveScale following the software company’s inability to attract major investments and compete with peers in the competitive software composable infrastructure market. 

While Twitter did not officially announce the acquisition of DriveScale, the company’s Platform Lead Nick Tornow welcomed the addition, stating that DriveScale’s experienced team will join Twitter’s Compute team as part of the deal.

“Drivescale’s extremely experienced team will bring deep knowledge of storage protocols, technologies, and products to help us develop a persistent block-level storage product in our data centers to accelerate application development across the company,”  he wrote on Twitter.

Drivescale’s extremely experienced team will bring deep knowledge of storage protocols, technologies, and products to help us develop a persistent block-level storage product in our data centers to accelerate application development across the company 🚀 (2/3)

— Nick Tornow (@nicktornow) January 25, 2021Opens a new window

Founded by industry veterans Duane Northcutt, Tom Lyon, and Satya Nishtala in 2013, DriveScale offered scalable and flexible computing solutions for organizations with standard servers and off-the-shelf storage prior to its acquisition.  

The company started by selling dynamically composed server systems and storage before unveiling its DriveScale Software Composable Infrastructure, enabling organizations to recompose compute and storage resources to meet business needs. The solution’s ability to support workloads such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, NoSQL, Cassandra, Docker, and Kubernetes quickly made DriveScale a promising prospect in the cloud storage solutions industry.

What Happened To DriveScale?

DriveScale was among  several promising companies offering software composable infrastructure services to organizations of all sizes until last year. The company specialized in developing low-cost, scalable, and high-performance storage products to compete with big-name competitors such as HPE Synergy and Liqid. 

“One of the core capabilities you want with composable infrastructure: it should make low-cost, commodity compute and storage highly available, high performance, and very high scale. We’re truly a software application that runs on anyone’s hardware,” said  Denise Shiffman, the then-CPO of DriveScale.  

See More: Is Software Composable Infrastructure Triggering a DevOps Revolution?

S.K. Vinod, DriveScale’s VP of Product Management, also said that the company continually looked for ways to improve existing product offerings to better serve a broad range of organizations and industries and solve the common challenges faced by IT administrators in their data center infrastructures. Enabling customers to utilize their infrastructure resources and quickly responding to changing business requirements was the company’s mantra for success.

However, in the eight years since it was founded, DriveScale managed to raise only $26M via funding rounds, with the last fundraising effort in May 2018 generating a measly $8M. In comparison, competing composable infrastructure software platform Liqid raised $28MOpens a new window via a Series B round in 2019, and Fungible, a data-centric computing solutions provider, also raised $200M in Series C financing.

So, where did it go wrong? While DriveScale offered a growing tribe of cloud adopters the ability to compose data stored in various storage devices, it wasn’t growing fast enough to merit big-dollar investments. Its valuation stood at just $50M last summer compared to Liqid, which raised its valuation to about $500M after its series B round in 2019.

See More: Legacy NAS Storage Has Become a Liability, Switch to Global File System

This difference perhaps indicates the advantagesOpens a new window of using the right connectivity fabric. DriveScale depended on Ethernet while Liqid employed a PCIe (PCI-Express) switch that offered it greater flexibility of composing more than storage at a better speed.

DriveScale had great plans, and even greater capabilities to successfully achieve those plans. However, the COVID-19 pandemic played havoc with the company’s financial situation. This acquisition, as such, comes as a lifesaver for the DriveScale team. 

Twitter’s exact plans about DriveScale were not disclosed by the company. However, Twitter’s Platform Lead, Nick Tornow, announced that the team of experts from DriveScale will help it develop a persistent block-level storage product in their data centers to accelerate application development across the company.

Do you think the DriveScale acquisition makes sense for a company like Twitter? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!