<|begin_of_text|><|begin_of_text|><|begin_of_text|>First they bought Skyera, erstwhile all flash array startup. Now WD's HGST unit is buying Amplidata, a scale-out object storage software vendor. Is the world's largest disk drive vendor moving into the storage systems business or not<wm>?
Not anymore. That's the question.
The companies announced the deal (known as the joint marketing and strategic partnership agreement) last week, in principle, with plans of going to be formalized later on.

What does this indicate? No more talking to the storage industry experts when WD is thinking of venturing. Not since 1993 when Seagate was struggling and Intel was a key player, and now they are going to be the primary players in all flash storage systems. These are huge deals</wm> in our fast world of IT equipment manufacturing.



It's not every day you hear that a multib