Western Digital Corp. announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Virident Systems, Inc., a leading provider of server-side flash storage for virtualization, database, cloud computing, and webscale applications. Virident will be integrated into HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. The acquisition furthers HGST's strategy to address the rapidly changing needs of enterprise customers by delivering intelligent storage solutions that maximize application performance by leveraging the tightly coupled server, storage and network resources of today's converged datacenter infrastructures.

The Virident acquisition follows HGST's recent purchase of sTec, an early innovator in enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) and VeloBit, an advanced I/O optimization software company. These investments expand HGST's presence in the rapidly growing and strategic enterprise SSD space, which IDC predicts will grow from $2.5 billion in revenue in 2012 to $7.2 billion in revenue by 2017.

HGST is redefining SSD-enabled application performance and system efficiency for enterprise and cloud datacenter environments. Beyond delivering a broader portfolio of high-performance SSDs, HGST is integrating system software with SSD design to fully realize the unique performance capabilities of solid-state storage. Tighter SSD hardware and software integration results in an easily deployable and virtualized performance storage tier that delivers greater resource efficiency and utilization. Ultimately, these intelligent storage devices significantly improve the user experience across a variety of performance-intensive applications, including cloud services, Big Data analytics, and high-volume transaction processing.

"We welcome the talented Virident team to HGST and look forward to working together to solve customer challenges and drive the evolution of datacenter storage," said Mike Cordano, president of HGST. "Virident has advanced PCIe flash hardware and software solutions that accelerate application performance and virtualization of memory and storage resources. Our datacenter customers will be able to share SSD storage capacity across applications and servers, for greater efficiency, agility, and scale."

Virident CEO Mike Gustafson is joining HGST as a senior vice president leading the Virident team. Mr. Gustafson, who has more than 20 years of experience in the storage, server, networking systems and IT industries, will report to HGST President Mike Cordano.