Six Months After Coming Out Of Stealth, EMC Has Reportedly Bought ScaleIO For As Much As $300 Million

ScaleIO, an Israeli startup with offices in Palo Alto, has reportedly been bought by EMC for between $200 and $300 million, says Avi Schneider at the Israeli Geektime blog, citing unnamed sources.

We contacted ScaleIO and were told, "no comment." TechCrunch reports that the companies aren't talking yet because the deal is still in its final stages.

ScaleIO was founded in early 2011 but just came out of stealth in December with the news that it had landed a $12 million investment led by Greylock and Norwest Venture Partners. So, a $200-$300 million acquisition would be an impressive return.

ScaleIO is one of a wave of hot storage startups that could disrupt storage stalwarts like EMC. Its software makes the inexpensive disks in a group of computer servers act like an expensive "storage array," meaning that the disks act like one big pool of storage, instead of being dedicated to a single server.

In that way, a server with a disk that is hardly being used can share capacity with one that needs more.

As companies generate mounds of data, they are in a constant need for more computer storage. ScaleIO says that its tech can save them up to 80% over buying other types of enterprise storage.

Cofounder Erez Webman had joined XtremeIO as chief architect in 2009 before it sold to EMC 2012 for $430 million. Before that, he founded Topio, which sold to NetApp in 2006. The rest of the team of cofounders, Boaz Palgi, Lior Bahat, Eran Borovik, and Erez Unga, have a long history in the storage market, too.