The storage consolidation continues: HP acquires IBRIX

HP on Friday picked up IBRIX, a file serving software company, in the latest round of merger and acquisition activity. Terms of HP's acquisition weren't disclosed.

IBRIX provides enterprise-class file serving software designed for data protection, high availability and cloud computing environments.

The deal comes as EMC won Data Domain for $2.1 billion. EMC outbid NetApp for the company.

In a nutshell, storage giants are gobbling up smaller companies to round out their portfolios and get ahead of trends. These hardware players are also chasing growth---storage is one of the few bright spots in a declining market.

In a statement, HP said the IBRIX deal is designed to position the company better in the cloud storage market. IBRIX, an HP partner for the last three years, has 53 employees and 175 enterprise customers in multiple verticals.