future SSD news? - from StorageSearch.comFusion-io acquires
Microsoft's server business
Editor:- October 3, 2021 -
following rumors last week on Twitter and Facebook - Fusion-io today
confirmed that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the server IP
and related business assets of Microsoft.
Details of the financial settlement haven't been disclosed.
Editor's
comments:- despite the dominance in the enterprise server OS market of
Google's Chrome-server, Amazon's AWS-cubed and Cloud-Linux there are still tens
of millions of servers around the world which run apps on various versions of
Microsoft's server OS - a market legacy which goes back to the days when the
company dominated the computer systems software market over a decade
ago.
It's been several years since there has been a major update of
the Windoss OS which is the result of Microsoft refocusing its business away
from declining old style technology platforms and onto the much bigger and more
profitable modern markets of games, apps and content.
Fusion-io's
acquisition of Microsoft's server business and related IP is good news for the
millions of businesses which haven't yet migrated legacy apps to new platforms -
because they can now look forward to performance upgrades and maybe another 3-5
years of viable operating life.
On a technical note over 90% of the
data systems software which enables apps to work is now tied up in the SSD
layers - so the old traditional OS's have become a much smaller and less
critical part of the software (and budget). But having access to source code of
those old OS's can still make a difference to how fast the SSD layers run.
Why
is Fusion-io interested in this small segment of today's internet?
"Because
we want to be everywhere there's data which can be apped faster" - said a
company spokesperson from Fusion-io's phone division. "And we see an
opportunity for embedding some much needed API tweaks deep in the kernel
of the Windoss VM market."
It's funny to think that back in
the old days
of the SSD market most of the talk which revolved around
acquisitions and
SSDs assumed that it was the SSD companies which were being acquired by
traditional computer, rotating storage and chip companies rather than the other
way around.
Now it's the SSD companies who are the dominant
players in data infrastructure - because the money is in the data. And
without SSDs -
you
can't get at the data or do anything useful with it in the short time which
the market demands.
The many acquisitions and SSD oriented
rebrandings we've seen in the market recently fit into an established
pattern of vendors abandoning old style computer identities in favor of the
new solid state storage enabled data content economy.
footnotes re - future SSD news? - a new series by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor
When this story originally appeared on the
SSD news page of
StorageSearch.com (in October 2012) I inserted some deliberate signals to
readers to indicate that it was a spoof. These were:-
- the date - October 32, 2021. October normally only has 31 days. However
the year at which I've set the story - 2021 was chosen to represent a time when
I anticipate this kind of thing might happen in real life.
- the misspelling of Microsoft to Microsloft. Although I have replaced
this back to Microsoft in this standalone archived edition - where there isn't
any possible room for misinterpretation - due to the phrase - "future news"
- being in the title of the document.
My new series - future SSD
news? - will stories like this to illustrate the long term destination of
current strands in the SSD market.
It's not the first time I've used
this technique.
A few years ago I did something similar to illustrate
the distant future convergence of several complex technology and business
factors in my article -
this way to the
Petabyte SSD.
The new series - which is intended to make you think
more about what could happen - will be updated monthly - and may appear in
some unexpected places.
correction to - FIO acquires Microsloft's server business
3
weeks after posting this spoof article I mentioned it to Rick White - who is the
real co-founder and CMO of
Fusion-io.
Rick
said - "We would probably buy
EMC first (similar to how
the little PC company called
Compaq eventually
bought DEC)."
Rick went on to say that whichever way - if it
did happen - he'd be happy to for me to interview him about it for the readers
of StorageSearch.com |
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