Canberra-based Instaclustr, a provider of fully-managed open-source databases, has been acquired by NetApp in a move that is expected to triple the storage giant's current Australian workforce of 150 employees.

Instaclustr, with two of its four founders being ANU graduates, was created in 2013 in a shared innovation space on the ANU campus and now has approximately 300 employees. The company has since gone on to count a number of Fortune 500 companies among its customers.

Investment fund ANU Connect Ventures -- jointly owned by the university and Spirit Super -- led the seed round of funding for Instaclustr in 2014. Since then, they've since contributed AU$8.5 million into the company.

ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt said that the rise of the company should be regarded as a success for Australia's universities in creating "the jobs, products and industries of tomorrow today."

"The returns to the University from this investment will now seed our new activities for years to come."

NetApp said that the acquisition would help build its offering in the cloud space when combined with Instaclustr's services.

"With Instaclustr, we can provide a platform to run, optimize, and secure multiple open-source databases, data pipelines and workflows. We will offer an open and extensible platform as a service, empowering application teams to build and deploy innovations at speed," NetApp executive vice president and general manager for public cloud services Anthony Lye said. 

NetApp's has in the past acquired Spot, CloudCheckr, Data Mechanics, and Fylamynt.

For NetApp, the acquisition comes off the back of the company delivering better than expected third quarter results of which it said that its all-flash array annualised net revenue run rate hit a record$3.2 billion.

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