Western Digital buys Kazan Networks to expand data infrastructure portfolio

Western Digital is buying Kazan Networks, makers of adapter- and ASIC-level integration products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. With the addition of Kazan Networks, Western Digital, which has expanded its enterprise focus via acquisitions, is hoping to ramp up its development of data infrastructure offerings and expand its portfolio of fabric-enabled architectures including the OpenFlex composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform that was released last year. OpenFlex is about disaggregating compute, storage and network resources, so they can be independently scaled and quickly orchestrated. The infrastructure is designed for high-scale environments with common data sets that are accessed by diverse applications -- both performance-intensive applications as well as more batch-analytics oriented applications.