NetApp Inc. today announced that it’s expanding its product portfolio with the acquisition of Talon Storage Solutions Inc., a provider of hybrid cloud storage software based out of New Jersey.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Talon has developed a software platform, FAST, that helps enterprises with a lot of branch locations manage their storage infrastructure more efficiently. The problem it addresses is that branch offices’ storage environments are often burdened by duplicate files such as backups of records which already exist elsewhere inside the company. FAST is a virtual appliance that runs locally at remote offices and only downloads the most frequently used files onto the local environment, freeing up capacity.

Talon claims that the capacity its software frees can add up fast. Jaap van Duijvenbode, a product director with the company, wrote in a blog post that FAST has enabled some customers to cut their storage costs by as much as 70%.

More than 400 organizations use the software, including insurance giant Swiss Reinsurance Ltd, Lego AB and Capita plc.

Quite a few of Talon’s customers are also NetApp customers. That’s thanks to the fact that Talon has already been offering integrations between its FAST platform with Cloud Volumes OnTap, NetApp’s cloud-based data storage system. Companies can pool all their data in a CloudVolumes OnTap deployment running on one of the major public clouds and then sync the data to their branch offices using FAST, creating essentially one big, unified storage layer that can be managed centrally.

NetApp plans to more tightly integrate FAST with its products in the wake of the acquisition. The deal will boost the company’s burgeoning cloud data services unit, which is still small relative to its main data center hardware business but has been experiencing rapid growth lately. For the most recent quarter ended Jan. 24, NetApp reported a 146% jump in recurring cloud data services revenue.

Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the acquisition is part of the company’s attempt to accelerate customers’ ability to move remote offices and back offices to the cloud — specifically NetApp’s platform.

“We wanted to give our customers a more complete solution, a single source,” Lye said. “We want to make it simple for people to move workloads to us.”

In the next 90 days, he said, Talon’s solutions will become part of a Global File Cache service that will be offered mostly free to customers of NetApp’s Cloud Volumes Service and Azure NetApp Files solution. “We’ll be offering more and more data services,” Lye added.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: NetApp