NetApp, Inc. announced yesterday that the company has entered an agreement to acquire Solid-Fire for $870 million in cash after the stock market closed on Monday, Dec. 21.

According to Forbes, the acquisition of SolidFire seals a hole in NetApp's portfolio. In fact, the network data storage provider plans to incorporate SolidFire into its data fabric strategy which is focused on delivering data management across disk, flash and cloud resources. The plan will give NetApp a little extra leverage which can boost the company's appeal to other big enterprises to make their data centers as scalable and efficient like that of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Besides, offering more products to the market, which customers will genuinely want, can speed up the company's revenue growth each quarter.

"This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centers," said George Kurian, chief executive officer of NetApp.

Aside from NetApp, other companies that have been interested in acquiring SolidFire are EMC, Cisco Systems, and Samsung. Among these three, Samsung Ventures was the lead investor of SolidFire, covering around $31 million in 2013. Cisco, on the other hand, had held talks with SolidFire earlier this year regarding their strategic partnership and acquisition but it didn't work out because the two companies were unable to come to terms.

SolidFire is a solid-state data storage hardware for cloud-mined data centers based in Boulder, Colorado. It became widely known as it provides great and excellent services to companies including Colt, 1&1, SunGard and Datapipe helping them build high-performance, multi-tenancy storage systems. The company also reached its milestone when it raised about $150 million in just five rounds since it was founded in 2010. The latest is an $82 million Series D which was led by Silicon Valley Bank and Greenspring Associates in October 2014.

Meanwhile, NetApp first announced their all-flash storage hardware product, EF540, to the market back in 2013, but that didn't make the company gain popularity under the product niche. The product is based on SANtricity software which was acquired from Ingenio. In 2014, they reoffered an all-flash version of their flagship DataONTAP which is based on FAS arrays to the market. But despite that, NetApp still struggle with flash even up to now. That's why the newly assigned NewApp CEO George Kurian pledged to boost the company's efficiency despite the declining legacy storage product lines.