OCZ acquires SSD controller
company
Editor:- March 14, 2011 - OCZ today announced it has
signed a definitive agreement to acquire Indilinx for for
approximately $32 million of OCZ common stock.
Indilinx controllers
have been deployed within OCZ's SSD products since December 2008, and are
currently featured in the Z-Drive series of
PCIe-based SSDs.
Indilinx's technology is expected to enable OCZ to expand its presence into the
embedded, hybrid storage, and industrial markets. OCZ will gain substantial
intellectual property from Indilinx including approximately 20 patents and
patent applications related exclusively to the business as part of the
transaction.
Following its acquisition by OCZ, Indilinx will continue
to produce and supply its line of controller products to
SSD manufacturers and OEMs
on a global basis. The Indilinx controller business, and its 45 employees, will
remain intact under the leadership of Bumsoo Kim, the
founder and President of Indilinx, and Hyunmo Chung, Indilinx's CTO. OCZ
will continue its own R&D program to develop new proprietary technologies
and products to expand its own solid state drive offerings. The Indilinx
acquisition notwithstanding, OCZ plans to continue utilizing controllers from
other manufacturers including long-term partner
SandForce, who
currently supplies SSD processors for a wide range of the Company's SSD products
including the Vertex 2, Agility 2, RevoDrive, customizable Deneva enterprise
drives, and the upcoming Vertex 3 family of SSDs.
"This transaction is an important step in OCZ's strategy and
significantly enhances our ability to capitalize on the worldwide demand for
Solid State Drives," said Ryan
Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "This combination brings
together 2 organizations that are committed to advancing solid state drive
design, and provides a unique opportunity for OCZ to increase both customer and
shareholder value as well as expand our reach into embedded markets."
Editor's comments:- this announcement will send ripples
throughout the SSD industry. OCZ has been one of the most successful SSD
companies at growing sales revenue by filling the gap in the mid market for
fast (but not too insanely
fast) and affordable
SSDs.
I had previously said that the most significant gap in OCZ's
profile (given its revenue and comparing it to its peers in the
top SSD companies list)
was IP.
Acquiring
an SSD controller company
is an astute move. In the medium term it will enable OCZ to influence product
features to maximize the fit to user market needs which OCZ has been so adept
at spotting. The newly acquired patent base will also provide horse trading
and licensing revenue opportunities in the long term.See also:-
3 Easy Ways to Enter
the SSD Market
Recovering Data from Flooded Hard Drives
Editor:-
March 13, 2011 - it's with great sadness and regret that I have to report that
the article
Recovering
Data from Drowned / Flooded Hard Drives - which includes useful tips for
protecting disks even before you send then to
data recovery companies
- has become popular in the past few days.
The Japanese people have
shown a level of discipline, organization and courageous response to their
recent disasters which the rest of the civilized world can only view with
admiration.
Fusion-io plans IPO
Editor:- March 9, 2011 - Fusion-io today
announced
it has filed a registration statement on
Form
S-1 with the
SEC for a proposed IPO of shares of its
common stock to raise upto $150 million.
Editor's comments:-
the valuation (when we learn it) is something which everyone in the SSD market
will be interested to know. If the enterprise SSD market has a future - then by
any rational measure you can make today Fusion-io will be one of the leading
companies in that market. Or the leading company - depending how much
confidence you place in the predictive powers of
StorageSearch.com's top
SSD companies lists (which track SSD buyer search volume).
The
important caveats here are:- that markets don't always behave rationally and
that even having a leading position in a fast growing technology market in one
year doesn't guarantee that the shape of the market and that leadership will be
the same in ensuing years. I've got to say that - because I reported on a lot of
IPOs during the dotcom
bubble in the late 1990s - and we're only just starting to see the first
swelling of the
SSD market bubble.
You can read what
I've
said in the past about Fusion-io . And if you follow up the many links which
start from the SSD
analysts page you'll see interesting stuff there too.
The SSD
market is a very competitive market with a lot of smart and talented people and
companies working hard to make their vision of the future - the one that will
succeed. Unlike the PC market, or the microprocessor market or the search-engine
market - I don't believe that a single company will dominate all aspects of the
SSD market. There are too many fragments in the SSD market which actually need
different types of solutions. But I've always expected that the biggest
chunk of the SSD pie will be enterprise SSDs.
If you think that
annual SSD market revenue in 2020 will be on the order of
$100 billion / year
- which is what I anticipate - then you're going to put different numbers in
your spreadsheet than if you believe
Seagate's view
- which is they've only introduced some SSD products to stop pesky analysts
asking why they haven't done so yet - but (unlike me) Seagate doesn't
believe that the
future
is solid state.
From the SEC filing we lean that Fusion-io's
revenue for the 2nd half of 2010 was $58 million. The document also includes a
scholarly assessment of the state of the enterprise SSD market, key competitors
and risk factors. From that point of view it makes
good
reading.
In later years:-
anticipating
FIO's quarterly results became a preoccupation with many SSD analysts and
bloggers and when the
market
commentary for 2011 in SSD market history was written I called it "year
of the FIO IPO".
NetApp acquires Engenio
Editor:- March 9, 2011 -
Network Appliance
announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase the Engenio external
storage systems business of LSI for $480 million.
The close is anticipated to occur in approximately 60 days subject to
customary closing conditions.
Engenio will enable NetApp to address
emerging and fast-growing market segments such as
video, including
full-motion video capture and digital video surveillance, as well as high
performance computing applications, such as genomics sequencing and scientific
research. NetApp has the channel reach and customer relationships today that
require high performance and big bandwidth capabilities that will be well served
by Engenio's storage platform. NetApp says these segments are expected to
collectively represent a $5
billion incremental market opportunity by 2014.
Editor's
comments:- LSI has been trying to sell off Engenio since 2004. NetApp will
love them more. For a brief time this past week - searches for Engenio exceeded
that for "SSD". In the previous decade over
500 leading storage
companies were acquired, changed name or went bust.
Anobit ships new 3-bits-per-cell flash SSD controller
Editor:-
March 8, 2011 -
Anobit
announced today that it has commenced high volume production of its
MSP2020 NAND
flash memory controller in cooperation with Hynix Semiconductor.
The
MSP2020 controller enables the use of commercial-grade 2-bits-per-cell and
3-bits-per-cell NAND flash across all of the latest process nodes, within
endurance- and performance-intensive embedded computing applications. MSP2020
controllers support up to 2 ONFI-compliant NAND interfaces to a host processor,
and can support product configurations from 4GBs to 128GBs.
"In
the span of just 5 years, the endurance of mainstream NAND flash has plummeted
from 100,000 program/erase cycles to approximately 3,000 cycles, and the
industry push toward 3-bit-per-cell MLC NAND will place further downward
pressure on NAND endurance.
In parallel, mobile computing devices will continue to fuel demand for higher
NAND endurance and performance," said Gregory Wong, founder and
principal analyst, Forward
Insights. "Anobit's
innovative MSP technology is well positioned to close the NAND endurance
gap, and in so doing, help fuel the proliferation of NAND flash memory into a
variety of consumer electronics and computing markets."
no recall yet for Intel's new SATA 3 SSD
Editor:-
March 8, 2011 - I can't remember the name of the
8th
man to land on the moon although I'm sure there was a press release about it
at the time - and for the same reason I didn't think it was newsworthy when Intel recently
launched
the SSD 510 - a 2.5"
SATA 3 MLC SSD with
250GB capacity and upto 315MB/s sequential write performance (which could have
been faster if it had a different
SSD controller inside.
They'll just have to buy
someone when the market gets bigger and these comparisons get too
embarrassing).
What is newsworthy about this new Intel SSD -
and the reason I waited till today before mentioning it - is that a whole week
has gone by without any mention of a product recall or firmware upgrade (to make
it work) announcement. These have been the traditional follow ups to many of
Intel's past SSD launches. I haven't seen one yet. Maybe I'm speaking too soon.
Or maybe Intel's SSD product management is getting better.
Editor:-
my thanks to Robert
Young who was the first reader to tell me that maybe the reason there
hasn't been a recall yet is because Intel's new SSD uses an
SSD controller from
Marvell instead of one
of its own. Among other things Robert publishes a blog about relational database
performance, SSDs and parallelism called
Dr. Codd Was Right |
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| SSD sudden power
loss vulnerability guide |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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