DataCore Acquires StarWind, Adding HCI Technology For Edge, Remote-Office/Back-Office Applications

‘And so what we have now is the industry’s broadest solution, depending on where you’re at in the core, edge or cloud. And StarWind completes that journey for us because it has an edge-oriented HCI solution. We’re basically complete now. We go to our customers wherever they are in their journey,’ says DataCore CEO Dave Zabrowski.

Software-defined storage pioneer DataCore Wednesday unveiled the acquisition of StarWind Software, a developer of hyperconverged infrastructure technology aimed at edge and remote-office/back-office applications.

With the acquisition, for which no dollar value was provided, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based DataCore is making its first move beyond its data center focus with StarWind’s technology that combines compute, storage and networking.

DataCore has been talking with StarWind for the better part of a year and is excited to bring the company on board, said DataCore CEO Dave Zabrowski (pictured).

“They’ve got a great product,” Zabrowski told CRN. “They're kind of an under-the-radar company because they don’t spend a lot in marketing, but their product is outstanding. I interviewed a bunch of their customers as part of our diligence, and they're raving about them. They’ve got excellent retention numbers. Customers buy them, they like them, they expand with them, they keep them.”

Beverly, Mass.-based StarWind’s technology is particularly well-known for edge and remote-office/back-office applications, Zabrowski said.

“It's very lightweight, and it’s all able to be provisioned remotely,” he said. “They have proactive customer support that monitors telemetry so they can actually stop problems where they happen. It's kind of a fleet-manager-type of solution, but it’s unique in the industry because they do very proactive monitoring of the systems.”

StarWind’s hyperconverged infrastructure technology, like those of companies including Nutanix and Scale Computing, competes with industry heavyweight VMware by Broadcom.

StarWind also competes with Nutanix and Scale Computing, Zabrowski said.

“StarWind has been very successful in getting a lot of frustrated Broadcom customers moving over into a different hypervisor,” he said. “Every VMware shop in the industry is frustrated, and StarWind has been taking advantage of that because it has a hypervisor-agnostic solution. For us, it completes our DataCore Next platform.”

The DataCore Next platform has been being built for several years, going back to when the company introduced its first major product, SANsymphony, a software-defined technology for structured block storage workloads, Zabrowski said. However, he said, the real growth in data storage is in unstructured data in the cloud and on the edge, leading DataCore to make a number of key acquisitions to expand its reach. These include:

DataCore in 2021 acquired Caringo, a developer of scalable software-defined S3-compatible object storage it calls Swarm. Caringo, which is a hybrid technology that works on-premises and in the cloud, is very scalable, with some customers using it for up to 100 petabytes of data, he said.
2021 also saw DataCore acquire MayaData, the leading independent developer of container-attached storage and the original developer of the OpenEBS open-source Kubernetes storage technology. DataCore previously invested $26 million in MayaData. DataCore continues to support the open-source version and also builds a revenue-generating version, Zabrowski said.
DataCore in late 2023 acquired Workflow Intelligence Nexus, or WIN, a developer of AIOps technology that allowed it to work directly with applications generating large datasets to optimize them for utilizing the underlying storage.
DataCore late last year containerized its Swarm S3-compatible object storage to make it available for edge applications.
Earlier this year, DataCore acquired Pixitmedia, developer of Pixstor, a high-performance, software-defined storage technology built for media and entertainment.

DataCore, as part of its DataCore.Next vision, wants to deliver best-in-class storage technology from the core to the edge to the cloud in whatever form best suits customers, Zabrowski said.

“And so what we have now is the industry’s broadest solution, depending on where you’re at in the core, edge or cloud,” he said. “And StarWind completes that journey for us because it has an edge-oriented HCI solution. We’re basically complete now. We go to our customers wherever they are in their journey.”

StarWind bundles storage, compute and networking on customers’ choice of hypervisor and makes the technology available as a software appliance or preloaded on hardware, typically from Dell Technologies, Lenovo or Supermicro, as a turnkey appliance, Zabrowski said.

The StarWind technology is designed specifically for deployment in remote locations where there usually is no IT staff, and so there is no cloud-based version, he said.

“Think of a retail application,” he said. “You’re going into a small store. There’s an owner-operator, probably an entrepreneur, that has that shop as a franchisee. They get it out of the box, plug it in, connect it to the Wi-Fi router, and everything else is done by the product. They can load their point-of-sale, time card or reordering applications, whatever they want. And it’s all done remotely. There’s no IT person necessary in that application, whereas in the cloud there’s scores of IT professionals.”

StarWind, like DataCore, primarily sold and delivered its technology via indirect channels, Zabrowski said.

“DataCore has been a channel-centric provider since long before I showed up,” he said. “We’ve doubled down on that with every acquisition. Even with some of the acquisitions that had some direct business, we’ve actually redirected that policy. So we want to work with and for our partners. We don’t want to work around partners or against them. It drives me crazy when I see companies that have one side of the house telling partners, ‘We love you,’ and the other side is going around and trying to steal business from them.”

The acquisition is closed. DataCore gains an additional 100 personnel, including the entire StarWind executive team, bringing the total company head count to 500, Zabrowski said.

Initially, DataCore will focus on bringing the two teams together, with a sales kickoff scheduled for next month to get both sides cross-selling each other’s products, Zabrowski said.

StarWind, like DataCore, was a profitable company, Zabrowski said.

“It’s not typical in this space that you see companies that are profitable,” he said. “DataCore just finished our 15th consecutive year of profitability. StarWind has been profitable for several years and, when I say they were under the radar, they actually focused on just making products and making customers happy. They didn’t spend a lot on beautiful buildings or fancy branding campaigns or anything like that. They’ve been very, very founder-focused. They’re not venture-backed. They were bootstrapped by the founders, and they have an angel investor as well that’s helped them. They’ve been focused on driving good value for customers.”

DataCore, which is private equity-backed, has no plans to do further acquisitions this year, Zabrowski said.

Between StarWind and Pixitmedia, DataCore has added 200 to its head count in 2025, he said.

“That’s a lot to integrate,” he said. “We were 300 to start the year, and now we’re 500. So while we'll continue to be active in the market, I would expect our next acquisition to be sometime in the first half of next year.”