Object storage appliance provider Cloudian Inc. has decided that its partnership with Infinity Storage was so successful that it has bought the company outright.

Cloudian sells an object storage appliance it claims is “infinitely scalable,” with integrated data management features and broad interoperability. Object storage supports unstructured data, and it’s increasingly popular in big-data projects. Cloudian’s products, primarily used in corporate data centers, can be joined to cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 via application programming interfaces.

Just last month the company announced it had received $125 million in financing, through a $25 million investment from private equity firm Digital Alpha Capital and an extra $100 million in “utility financing,” which is effectively a loan.

As for Infinity Storage, it’s an Italian company that builds software-defined storage systems based on the “write-once-read-many” file system that founder Caterina Falchi helped create. The WORM file system was designed to preserve data integrity for regulatory compliance purposes, while also providing protection against corruption caused by malware and ransomware.

Cloudian was so impressed by Infinity’s file system that it teamed up with the company to integrate the technology with its HyperFile Network Attached Storage controller, which is used by enterprises to scale on-premises file services.

Now, Cloudian has taken the next step and today said it has acquired Infinity. The acquirer said it can now offer an integrated file and object-based storage system that can consolidate all unstructured data types into a highly scalable storage pool.

By pairing the two companies’ technologies, Cloudian said, it provides customers with new options for managing vast amounts of unstructured data in on-premises environments. “This acquisition further accelerates Cloudian’s efforts to reduce IT workloads with self-protecting and easy-to-scale file systems that analysts agree are critical for next-generation storage management,” said Michael Tso, Cloudian’s chief executive officer (pictured).

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. As part of the deal, Infinity’s founder Falchi will join Cloudian as vice president of file technologies.

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