... and Sandforce is gobbled up by LSI ...

From the register … This is interesting, as LSI appears to be girding for the next gen in storage. Flash (the PCIe variant) and SSD (the disk channel variant) are on the rise, and things that add value in that chain will be quite interesting acquisitions. We work closely with Virident, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they, or Texas Memory Systems were acquired by a larger entity. This isn’t consolidation in the classical sense, this is girding for future battle. There is not an over capacity in this market, there is something more akin to a war over the IP and capability foot prints. This is a good acquisition for LSI, and I hope that Sandforce continues to supply the SSD world with controllers. So far, despite my few issues with their compression, they seem to have one of the best controllers on the market. This said, I think this is going to alter the game for OCZ. They use Sandforce in the Vertex III and Deneva lines. And I think in the R4. They purchased Indilinx (another controller vendor) last year. Not sure if this is going to mean that OCZ will roll completely over to Indilinx, but I’d think that this is now open to serious consideration. If they do that, based upon past experience with Indilinx (look up our Corsair debacle from a year or more ago), yeah, that might alter the landscape a bit on who has better/faster products at the lower end. But the other aspect of interest in this is that LSI could, easily, integrate a Sandforce controller and flash onto its RAID and HBA cards, and provide something akin to a flash cache storage, at a very low price.

This gets interesting as the other folks out there can’t do that. Adaptec, Areca, Atto (why do they all start with “A” ?). Further, LSI sells RAID chipsets that many of these use, and it could wind up that these RAID vendors do outsource more and more to LSI in order to get that capability. Of course, Pliant was gobbled up, and in testing their products last year, all I can say is “meh”. The article notes that Anobit is the lone controller house. As they note, I suspect that they have had, or are having conversations that we will likely hear about soon. No, I know nothing about any of this, have no inside sources. This is just a guess. So who is going to buy Virident and TMS? I can guess (and I won’t say) on the former. Not sure on the latter … EMC? Someone else?