CDN specialist Akamai has acquired cloud storage technology provider Ondat in a surprising move that will bolster its own connected cloud offering, launched just days ago.
Details of the acquisition of the London-based company were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of March 2023.
Ondat competes with Portworx (now part of Pure Storage) and OpenEBS in the popular software-defined cloud-native storage market for Kubernetes and is application, infrastructure, and orchestration agnostic.
Beyond content delivery networks
It has a tiered offering with a free community that provides unlimited clusters, unlimited nodes, and 1TB capacity per cluster up to enterprises with unlimited cloud storage, 24/7 support, and a dedicated account manager for only €750. per node per year for a virtual machine (not bare metal).
Akamai has grown from one of the largest CDNs in the world to an entity that aspires to "power and protect life online" and interacts with billions of end users every day through a backbone that is present in more than 130 countries in nearly 4200 launches. .
Its acquisition of web hosting company Linode, in March 2022, expanded Akamai's global presence, giving it the tools to compete on a level playing field with rival CloudFlare, as well as hyperscalers that have increasingly expanded their own offerings. to compete with the traditional CDN.
Its global footprint means workloads can run seamlessly closer to where they're needed, regardless of location. It has also aggressively increased the number of products and services it offers, currently exceeding 82 as of this writing.
Beyond cloud and VPS hosting, Akamai offers ZTNA services, cloud firewall, DNS management, cloud backup, and DDoS protection, among others. It recently announced a 50% reduction in the price of egress surplus (up to 1PB per month), which it considers to be one of the biggest pain points for its customers (and the rest of the cloud computing industry).