NetApp wants to be at the intersection of two hot trends in a rapidly changing storage industry with its planned $870 million acquisition of startup SolidFire.

The five-year-old company has an all-flash architecture for distributed Web-scale data centers of the kind that service providers and now some enterprises have adopted so they can grow quickly and efficiently. That idea, along with the separate trend of hyper-converged systems that combine all the components of a data center into one box, threatens traditional purpose-built storage arrays of the sort that made big vendors like NetApp and EMC what they are today.

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