Tuxera acquires mission-critical embedded flash storage leader Datalight

Acquiring Datalight, Tuxera now offers the most comprehensive storage management software portfolio available to the market.

Seattle, Washington, and Espoo, Finland – June 5, 2019 – Tuxera, the world-leading storage software and networking technology company, has signed an agreement to acquire Datalight, the North American developer of embedded file systems, and flash management and acceleration software. The companies’ combined forces will now provide the most comprehensive embedded storage management software portfolio to meet the growing global demand for data storage. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), these demands will grow to an estimated global datasphere of 175 zetabytes (ZB) by 2025. Meeting these global demands will require over 22 ZB of storage capacity across all media types from 2018 to 2025.¹

Pushing the boundaries of data storage technology

Since 2008, Tuxera has been developing fail-safe, high-performance proprietary implementations of industry-standard file systems such as FAT, exFAT, NTFS, APFS, and HFS+. The company’s solutions have shipped in billions of consumer devices and vehicles to date. Tuxera also has its own high-performance file system, Reliance Velocity^TM, as well as network storage and streaming software solutions.

“Together, we will continue to develop new features for our existing products and bring market-leading innovations in embedded storage. Our combined product portfolio addresses the full spectrum of storage management needs, allowing us to better support our customers’ current and future business and technical requirements,” says Szabolcs Szakacsits, President and CTO of Tuxera.

Datalight, founded in 1983, develops both flash file systems and flash management software, such as EdgeFS^TM (formerly Reliance Edge^TM), NitroFS^TM (formerly Reliance Nitro^TM), and FlashFX Tera^TM. The company brings to Tuxera a deep understanding of technologies applied in flash controllers as well as file system technology used across many different embedded operating systems.

“We’re excited to join forces with Tuxera to create the industry’s broadest portfolio of data management solutions. Our shared experiences in “making it work” for our customers in diverse markets around the world gives us a common foundation on which to build innovative solutions to tomorrow’s data challenges,” says Kerri McConnell, CEO of Datalight.

All the leading expertise in flash management and file systems in one place

The engineering teams of the two companies combined now encompasses the top file systems and embedded storage experts around the globe. Their experience and understanding of storage technology covers any operating system or real-time operating system, any flash memory type, any hardware environment, and any interface, being either internal or external storage. The merging of the two companies will bring significant benefits to any device, vehicle, or industrial products manufacturer with onboard or edge storage requirements. These benefits include:

• Comprehensive storage management support for a broad range of devices from deeply embedded (such as microcontrollers), to vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft, and for all consumer and industrial IoT devices

• Improved file system performance, data reliability, flash memory lifetime, and hardware costs reduction

• Data storage support for both managed and unmanaged flash memory

• Industry-standard, fail-safe file systems like FAT, exFAT, NTFS, APFS, and HFS+

• Industry-standard file sharing protocol support such as SMB

• Flash memory quality and cost evaluation services

Transaction advisors Nordhaven Corporate Finance acted as exclusive financial advisor to Tuxera. DLA Piper acted legal advisor, and KPMG acted as tax advisor. Corum Group acted as exclusive financial advisor to Datalight, and Summit Law Group acted as legal advisor.

References [1] The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core, An IDC White Paper – #US44413318, Sponsored by Seagate.

Reliance Velocity^TM remains available for specific use cases. For availability and technical details, get in touch with us at sales@tuxera.com