Lenovo is buying privately-owned enterprise block array storage supplier Infinidat for an undisclosed amount.

Systems supplier Lenovo’s storage line-up is centered on small and medium enterprises. It was built up by Kirk Skaugen, who was the boss of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group from 2013 until June last year, when he was replaced by Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who was Western Digital’s WD’s EVP and GM of its hard disk drive (HDD) business. Lenovo’s products include the ThinkSystem DG all-flash, DM hybrid, and DE SAN arrays and are mostly OEM’d from NetApp’s ONTAP storage line.

Lenovo says it has the number one revenue position in the IDC storage market price bands 1 ($500,000) and is not a major player in the enterprise storage market where Infinidat has built its business.

Greg Huff, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group CTO, said in a statement: “With the acquisition of Infinidat, we are excited and well-positioned to accelerate innovation and deliver greater value for our customers. Infinidat’s expertise in high-performance, high-end data storage solutions broadens the scope of our products, and together, we will drive new opportunities for growth.”

Infinidat CEO Phil Bullinger said: “Infinidat delivers award-winning high-end enterprise storage solutions providing an exceptional customer experience and guaranteed SLAs with unmatched performance, availability, cyber resilience and recovery, and petabyte-scale economics. With Lenovo’s extensive global capabilities, we look forward to expanding the comprehensive value we provide to enterprise and service provider customers across on-premises and hybrid multi-cloud environments.”

Lenovo says it will gain:

• Mission critical enterprise storage for scalable, cyber-resilient data management and an in-house software R&D team.
• Expanded storage systems portfolio to cover high-end enterprise storage, building on Lenovo’s existing position in the entry and mid-range enterprise storage market.
• An opportunity to drive profitable growth of the Group’s storage business as Infinidat, combined with Lenovo’s existing global infrastructure business, customer relationships, and global supply chain scale, is expected to create new opportunities for high-end enterprise storage products and unlock new revenue opportunities for the Group’s storage business.

Infinidat was founded in 2010 by storage industry veteran Moshe Yanai and uses memory data cacheing in its InfiniBox systems to supply data from disk as fast if not faster than all-flash arrays. This base product line was expanded to include the InfiniBox SSA all-flash system and the InfiniGuard data protection system. These systems competed with IBM’s DS8000, Dell PowerMAX, and Hitachi Vantara’s VSP systems.

Eventually Infinidat’s growth sputtered somewhat and Yanai was forced out of the Chairman and CEO roles in 2020, becoming a technology evengelist and subsequently leaving. Western Digital’s SVP and GM of its disposed datacenter business unit, Phil Bullinger, became the CEO in 2021. At the time Bullinger said Infinidat was profitable, cashflow positive, and growing.

Since then Infinidat says it has grown, with a reported 40 percent year-on-year bookings growth in 2021, and double digit growth in 2022, when it was also cashflow-positive. It said it achieved record results and a 59 percent annual bookings growth rate in calendar Q1 of 2023. The company has a focus on cyber-resiliency and is also active in the AI area, with a RAG workflow deployment architecture enabling customers to run generative AI inferencing workloads on its InfiniBox on-premises.

Infinidat has raised a total of more than $370 million in funding, with the last round taking place in 2020.