OCZ acquisition of Sanrad Flash Force Virtualization Data Center

SSD manufacturer OCZ Marvell said in Monday that it had acquired the flash storage cache and virtualization software developer Sanrad in Israel.

OCZ says Sanrad's hardware and software products have been certified by VMware, Microsoft and Citrix to help speed up OCZ PCIe Flash storage solutions for virtualized data  centers.

Sanrad's VXL software deploys virtualized environments with the company's Flash cache and virtualization technology, allowing client virtual machines to be hosted in the cache. These virtual machines are connected to storage through industry-standard ISCSI protocols, allowing them to seamlessly work in operating systems such as Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, or Linux without having to install agents or drivers on each virtual machine.

VXL also supports important enterprise storage features, such as quality of Service (QoS), high-availability clustering, mirroring, WAN replication, and snapshots, and guarantees full cache migration for VMware's vmotion virtual machine migration capabilities.

At present, Sanrad technology sales to Nexsan and Brocade (Brocade) and other OEM, but also through sales to corporate customers.

In a prepared statement, OCZ's CEO, Ryan Petersen, said: This acquisition is very important for OCZ because it enables its SSD and PCIe Flash storage solutions to be applied to the virtual data Center environment.

"It greatly enhances the ability of customers to improve data center performance and efficiency by loading more virtual machines (VMS) onto the server without slowing down the ability to access the stored data, thus significantly reducing the overall cost of deployment," Petersen said in the statement. ”

Aaron Rakers, analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, wrote in a Monday summary report that the OCZ acquisition Sanrad was similar to the Fusion-io acquisition of IO Turbine last year.

Rakers wrote in the morning of Monday: "We believe that the acquisition is comparable to the previous Fusion-io acquisition of IO Turbine, Fusion-io acquired Iocache software/hardware, Extend the company's cache and data acceleration capabilities from the Fusion Directcache Software's Microsoft Windows and Linux environment to VMware ESX, Hyper-V. ”

In addition to the Fusion-io acquisition of IO Turbine, a series of mergers and acquisitions related to consolidating flash storage and memory technology were staged in 2011.

Apple was very rare in late December to acquire an Israeli flash drive performance chip development and SSD manufacturer Anobit.

The storage and network semiconductor maker LSI last fall acquired the leading developer SandForce, which controls the processing of flash, PCIe cache devices and similar products in SSD.

OCZ acquired the SSD controller technology developer Indilinx in March.

SSD controller manufacturer SanDisk acquired the SSD manufacturer Pliant Marvell in the summer.

OCZ paid the new 2.1 million common shares to Sanrad, worth 15 million yuan.

OCZ executives did not comment more.

(Responsible editor: Duqing first)