Cisco to accquire remote storage company

Cisco are planning to accquire Actona for $82 million. The news was announced last week.

This accquistion will give Cisco a remote office storage and caching appliance, which it will later offer as a module on 2600 and 3700 series WAN routers. Cisco says the technology can be used to eliminate remote file servers, storage and back-up devices from branch offices, while boosting performance of centrally hosted Unix-, Linux- and Windows-based applications.

Actona sells a caching appliance that sits in a remote branch office and provides a local instance of files stored on systems in a central data center. The appliance provides support for Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) environments used in Unix, Linux and Windows servers.

This seems like a smart move from Cisco as I increasingly find myself using a central storage medium. At the moment I would typically use my FTP server but integrating remote storage into your WAN is a logical progression.

It is at the storage end that market analysts have predicted the growth for Network Processor ultilisation, so it will be interesting to see what technology platform Cisco will adopt in the future.