The Silicon Valley-based provider announced it plans to buy FlashSoft Corporation, which offers application performance and virtualization software on Windows, Linux and WMware platforms. SanDisk intends to sell FlashSoft products as standalone software and in combination with its enterprise solutions for SAS, hard-disk interface and other interconnected devices as part of an expanded portfolio of SSD solutions and third-party offerings. Specifically, FlashSoft software focuses on input-output traffic and data center performance based on an algorithm for observing data traffic and caching data on server-tier SSDs, according to its website.
SanDisk highlighted FlashSoft’s capabilities for reducing hardware and operational costs, which go toward rounding out SanDisk’s enterprise storage offerings, said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra in a news release on the deal.
Developing capabilities, the growth of data volumes and economies of scale have increased recent interest in storage and memory avenues such as SSD. Tom Coughlin, founder of data storage consultancy Coughlin Associates, says that SanDisk has clout in the consumer market, particularly with mobile products, but only “limited success” with its previous enterprise storage efforts. Coughlin says this proposed deal provides SanDisk a greater range of options for virtualization connectivity, embedding and flash cost sharing.
“In order for solid state storage products to be more useful to the enterprise market software and system management must be able to recognize the unique characteristics of flash based storage and most effectively use the performance boost that flash based storage can provide versus mechanical storage systems,” Coughlin says.
SanDisk stated that the acquisition is expected to be neutral to its earnings in 2012, and then add more value than the cost of the deal through 2013. No further financial details were disclosed.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
