Sandisk now owns Fusion IO fully

Quite additive and possibly unique enterprise offerings impending

Jul 24, 2014 by

Sandisk LogoIt is official now, Sandisk owns Fusion IO completely putting the company in the forefront of enterprise flash. This may seem like a pretty minor event but it has some large long-term implications.

The headline is obvious, Sandisk bought Fusion IO for about $1.1 billion, give or take a few tens of millions between friends. This move takes Sandisk from a bit player in the enterprise SSD/Flash storage market to rough technological parity with the leaders. Where they previously had discrete components like SATA and SAS based enterprise SSDs, they can now run with those offering complete PCIe/NVMe solutions.

Sandisk has purchased other enterprise SSD companies and those parts are said to be moving towards market rather nicely. What they lack however is a ready market and datacenter ‘street cred’, something that can be more valuable than the rather precious pricing levels on the Fusion IO products. They also purchased a wealth of knowledge for this nascent market, something that is possibly more valuable than any single piece of silicon recently acquired.

In short this buy seems rather insignificant on the surface but if you couple it with the other impending bits Sandisk has under wraps, it becomes quite additive rather than a ‘longshot’. Sandisk is one of the few that owns the enterprise stack from the silicon to mission critical software solutions now. Couple this with their reputation and impending NVMe offerings and you have quite the pairing. It may never make headlines like the flashy consumer stuff, but it is far more important for moneyed customers.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate