SanDisk Acquires Californian Start-Up FlashSoft

SanDisk Corporation extended its enterprise SSD solutions portfolio with the acquisition of FlashSoft Corp., a provider of caching software products.

SanDisk intends to sell FlashSoft’s products as standalone software, as well as offer these software products in combination with SanDisk’s growing portfolio of SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.

FlashSoft’s software is targeted for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms, and will form the basis of a growing ecosystem of SSD-optimized software solutions from SanDisk and third party partners, enabling the configuration of complete solutions optimized for the specialized needs of enterprise and cloud customers.

Data center managers face ongoing challenges in achieving balanced application performance as the underlying system resources process data at different rates. As CPU speeds and memory bandwidth have grown rapidly, I/O bottlenecks have begun limiting application performance as data-starved CPUs must wait for overloaded I/O subsystems to deliver application data.

SSD-based caching solutions allow the most frequently accessed data to reside close to the CPU in flash memory, resulting in application performance increases. FlashSoft’s software solutions enable flash products, such as SanDisk’s Lightning Enterprise SSDs and PCIe-based devices, to be configured as high-performance cache for their HDD storage. This allows customers to improve performance with smaller, more cost effective storage configurations and to deploy more virtual machines per server in virtualized environments. SanDisk’s strategy for serving enterprise and cloud customers includes offering optimized hardware and software solutions, as well as partnering with leading ISVs and solution providers to enable customers to mix and match devices and software to optimize for specialized application requirements.

"The acquisition of FlashSoft represents an important step in SanDisk’s strategy of delivering complete SSD and software solutions to enterprise storage customers," said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of SanDisk. "FlashSoft’s software products complement our growing family of SAS, PCIe and SATA Enterprise SSDs, and we are pleased to welcome FlashSoft to the SanDisk family."

The FlashSoft acquisition is expected to be neutral to SanDisk’s earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013. Additional details of the acquisition were not released.

Comments

$5.7 billion SanDisk is historically a remarkable company in flash chips, keys and memory cards, and knowing nothing on SSDs. But the company wanted to target this growing market using its manufacture of hundreds of millions of chips annually with Toshiba.

Following the acquisition of excellent specialist msystems for as much as $1.5 billion in 2006, it entered into SSDs in 2007 with its own 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs and embedded USB modules, the following year into pSSDs, but with poor results. That's why the Californian firm decides to invest more and bought enterprise SSD maker Pliant Technology in 2011 for $327 million, resulting of the releases of finally up-to-date SSDs. Its enterprise Lightning 6Gb SAS flash drives family, up to 400GB in SLC and up to 800GB on MLC were even qualified by HP for Proliant servers last year. And the most recent 6GB SATA 2.5-inch SSDs X100 for OEMs and Extreme for the retail market can now compete head to head against other manufacturers.

The acquisition of FlashSoft for an unknown - but probably small - price is an excellent addition to complement its offering with caching software for better use of SSDs and to become a real power in this sector.

FlashSoft was already collaborating with SanDisk since last July 2011 for the integration of its software into SanDisk hardware.

The start-up, based in Mountain Vew, CA, was born in 2009 and got at least $3 mllion in series A financial funding in 2011. It was founded by CEO Ted Sanford, former CEO of Baccel and notably VP strategic alliances at AppStream (acquired by Symantec), and CTO Serge Shats, also previously at Baccel after working for Veritas and Quantum.

The idea behind SSD caching software: Despite the performance advantages of flash SSD, two barriers have slowed its adoption in the enterprise. First, when used as primary data storage, flash memory cannot easily integrate with and leverage the benefits of existing storage systems infrastructure. Secondly, storing all of an application's data on server-attached flash memory remains expensive.

FlashSoft SE is a software solution that automatically identifies and caches the most frequently used data - hot data - on any SSD in the server - to reduce I/O latency. It uses sophisticated algorithms to observe I/O traffic and cache hot data on server-tier SSDs. Written for Linux and Windows, it is compatible with SATA, SAS or PCIe SSDs. Most recently the firm releases FlashSoft SE-V Applies Enterprise Flash to accelerate performance in virtual machine environments based on vSphere 5.

SanDisk also just announced (see today's news) a partnership with Diskeeper to get flash caching software, but this time for ultrabooks.

We know at least four other start-ups implicated in this kind of software: IO Turbine (acquired by Fusion-io), Nevex, Nvelo and VeloBit. Adds also Adaptec, Diskeeper, EMC, OCZ, and Seagate (for hybrid HDDs).

The FlashSoft team will join SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions.

SanDisk's Acquisitions in SSDs

Year

Acquisition

Price*

Comment

2006

msystems

1,500

NAND flash technology

2011

Pliant Technology

327

Enterprise SSDs

2012

FlashSoft

SSD caching software