DDN announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Western Digital Corp. that includes an agreement to acquire Western Digital's IntelliFlash business. Additionally, the companies will expand their existing relationship through a mutual global strategic sourcing agreement. DDN and Western Digital are committed to executing a smooth transition for customers and key stakeholders. 

Building on its decades-long foundation in the most demanding data environments, DDN has greatly expanded its business over the past 12 months by acquiring market leading enterprise and multicloud technologies. This latest acquisition of IntelliFlash extends DDN's leadership as a value-add provider of AI and multicloud data management solutions. The strategic partnership also expands the relationship between DDN and Western Digital, enabling increasingly compelling storage solutions with new performance and cost innovations. 

"We are delighted to add Western Digital's high-performance enterprise hybrid, all flash and NVMe solutions to DDN's industry leading data management at scale product portfolio. We welcome members of the extremely talented WDC IntelliFlash team to our rapidly expanding DDN family and look forward to better serving our more than 10,000 customers and 500 partners worldwide with their data challenges across AI, analytics, IoT, multicloud and virtualized environments," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder of DDN. "With this acquisition, we are also strengthening our strategic partnership with Western Digital, who will become both a customer of IntelliFlash by DDN and a key HDD and SSD supplier to DDN." 

"Today's announcement represents a compelling step forward for IntelliFlash," said Mike Cordano, Western Digital president and chief operating officer. "With DDN's resources, technical expertise and focus on solving customers' end-to-end data and information management challenges, we believe IntelliFlash will be well equipped to enable new levels of efficiency for customers. We are committed to ensuring a seamless transition for customers and other key stakeholders, and looking forward to building a thriving strategic partnership with DDN."

DDN and Western Digital will be actively working to deliver a seamless transition for customers and partners with a promise of ongoing product availability and continuity of support. Existing IntelliFlash customers will benefit from DDN's focus on storage and data management challenges, deep expertise in service and support and its rich, broad technology portfolio. DDN will further invest in an accelerated roadmap of the IntelliFlash line and will be engaging closely with IntelliFlash customers to hear about business challenges and opportunities where DDN can innovate once the acquisition is complete.