Citrix Systems Inc. is apparently plotting an entry into converged infrastructure that could catch rival VMware Inc. off guard in the race to the software-defined data center. The company showed its hand on Monday by acquiring Sanbolic Inc. to fill the missing storage element of its ambitious strategy.

Sanbolic has developed a platform that enables organizations to aggregate different silos where they keep their data into a unified pool. That blunts the impact of individual hardware failures, effectively removing the risk of information becoming unavailable in the event of a localized outage.

Consolidating multiple systems under the same interface also has the advantage of sparing practitioners from having to learn the nuances of each storage solution in their environment and then navigating around compatibility issues every time data needs moving. That can prove valuable in the typical enterprise setting, where the most important information is often locked away in legacy arrays.

But the main focus for Sanbolic since introducing the fifth release of its platform in 2013 has been direct-attached storage, the flash and disk drives in the converged appliances that have swept through the enterprise over recent years. And therein lies the primary motivation behind the acquisition, according to Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante.

Citrix has certified its flagship desktop virtualization software for integrated systems from a wide range of vendors including emerging players such as Nutanix Inc. and more established names such as Cisco Systems Inc. and HP, but VMware is taking it a step further. The company recently introduced a homegrown appliance that layers an internally-developed management stack on partner-supplied hardware.

With the addition of the software-defined storage functionality from Sanbolic, Citrix now possesses most of the necessary components to build its own converged infrastructure platform. Such a solution would presumably see the technology bundled with the company’s open-source hypervisor, networking software and perhaps even CloudStack to form a potentially formidable threat to VMware’s vision for the software-defined data center.

Of course, that won’t sit particularly well with Citrix’s storage and converged infrastructure partners, which the acquisition risks outright alienating. But that’s a price that that the company is apparently willing to pay in order to match the EMC subsidiary on infrastructure. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal.