IBM said that it has bought XIV, an Israeli storage technology company, in an effort to expand its offerings to companies generating large amounts of data.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Israeli media reported last week that Big Blue was in talks to buy XIV for a sum between $300 million and $350 million.
IBM said XIV's main product, a data storage platform known as Nextra, is particularly attractive to so-called "Web 2.0" companies generating lots of data online. Traditionally, companies generating such large amounts of data continually spend huge sums to ramp up their data-storage offerings, but XIV says Nextra can reduce those expenditures significantly without sacrificing quality.
XIV will become part of IBM System Storage, a business unit in the company's systems and technology group.
"The acquisition of XIV will further strengthen the IBM infrastructure portfolio long term and put IBM in the best position to address emerging storage opportunities like Web 2.0 applications, digital archives and digital media," Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM System Storage, said in a written statement. "The ability for almost anyone to create digital content at any time has accelerated the need for a whole new way of applying infrastructure solutions to the new world of digital information. IBM's goal is to provide the leading technologies and solutions at every layer of the data center -- storage, servers, software and services -- to address these new realities IT customers face."