Commentary

Howard Marks Network Computing Blogger

See more from this author

Western Digital Buys Virident To Battle Flash Giants

Western Digital's $685 million acquisition of PCIe flash specialist Virident lets it compete with flash giants such as Intel/Micron and Samsung. But where was Seagate in all this?

By Howard Marks

Network Computing
September 10, 2013 11:37 AM

HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, acquired PCIe flash specialist Virident yesterday in a cash deal for $685 million. The move equips Western Digital/HGST to go head-to-head with major flash foundries such as Intel/Micron, Samsung and Toshiba.

Western Digital/HGST is assembling a significant portfolio in the flash arena. It started with a longstanding co-development program with Intel for SAS interface SSDs.

More Insights

These drives go into external storage systems where SAS's dual porting supports redundant controller architectures, which allows each drive to be independently connected to two controllers. Intel sells SSDs for the server side with PCIe and SATA interfaces, leaving SAS drives to HGST and its relationships with array vendors.

This spring, Western Digital's management decided that because there were no more disk drive vendors to acquire it would look for growth from flash.

This was a major turn for the company; before acquiring HGST, and as a result the SAS SSD line, Western Digital mostly sold SSDs for industrial applications where ruggedness, not speed, is the prime virtue.

[As the SSD market heats up, find out which companies are poised to thrive in "SSD Vendors: Which Will Win?"]

To that end, the company in June picked up sTec, the down-on-its-luck enterprise SSD pioneers, which brought a range of enterprise SSDs including a new PCIe design, into Western Digital's portfolio. In July, it bought Velobit for server-side caching software.

Where Was Seagate?

While Western Digital/HGST has been on an acquisition spree, I thought that if anyone was going to purchase Virident, it would be Seagate.

In January, Seagate invested $40 million dollars in Virident and started marketing the Virident FlashMAX cards as its X8 Accelerators. Seagate was also granted a seat on Virident's board.

It was a good partnership for both companies; Seagate gave Virident some enterprise credibility, while Virident filled the PCIe gap in Seagate's flash line. In the spring, EMC started using Virident's cards in EMC's XtremSF bundles.

Seagate may have to look for a replacement for Virident in its flash portfolio. One candidate is Fusion-io, the PCIe flash card market leader. But if Seagate wants to make an acquisition, it's going to be expensive. Fusion-io has a market capitalization of around a billion dollars, and on Monday is closed at $13.60, which was a rise of 25% for the day. Clearly, the market sees the Virident acquisition as good for Fusion-io. On the upside for Seagate, it should make a tidy profit on its $40 million investment.

Into the Big Leagues

Virident's FlashMAX PCIe flash cards perform with some of the best in a crowded market, and have admirably consistent latency. Some other PCIe SSDs can process hundreds of thousands of IOPS, but will have latency spikes of 10ms or more. By contrast, FlashMAX is more consistent.

If Western Digital/HGST just wanted PCIe SSDs to sell, it could have run with the sTec design. Virident also brings its FlashMAX Connect software, which uses the http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/virident-unlocks-pcie-flash-from-a-singl/240149216 FlashMAX card as a cache and also replicates data across multiple servers for a high-availability shared flash pool. Now the company has SSDs across the enterprise market and a full suite of software to manage them with.

The big flash foundries--Intel/Micron, Samsung, Toshiba/SanDisk and SK Hynix--have, through vertical integration, a leg up on those that just assemble flash and controller chips into SSDs. Western Digital/HGST has made all the right moves to separate itself from the pack and compete with the big boys. Now all it has to do is bring all these acquisitions together and deliver. We all know how easy that is.

[Catch Howard Marks' informative session "SSDs In the Data Center" at Interop New York, from September 30th to October 4th. Register today!]

, join the conversation

Editor's Choice

2013 SDN Survey: Growing Pains

In this report, we'll look at the state of Software-defined networking in the marketplace and examine the survey results. We'll also outline what a typical SDN infrastructure looks like in 2013, including a controller, programmable infrastructure, applications and network multitenancy. We'll dig into both OpenDaylight and OpenFlow, two open source initiatives that are shaping SDN from outside. Finally, We'll offer guidance for network professionals on how to approach bringing SDN into their own environments.
Get full survey results now! »

Vendor Turf Wars

The enterprise tech market used to be an orderly place, where vendors had clearly defined markets. No more. Driven both by increasing complexity and Wall Street demands for growth, big vendors are duking it out for primacy -- and refusing to work together for IT's benefit. Must we now pick a side, or is neutrality an option?
Get the Digital Issue »

WEBCAST: Software Defined Networking (SDN) First Steps

Software defined networking encompasses several emerging technologies that bring programmable interfaces to data center networks and promise to make networks more observable and automated, as well as better suited to the specific needs of large virtualized data centers. Attend this webcast to learn the overall concept of SDN and its benefits, describe the different conceptual approaches to SDN, and examine the various technologies, both proprietary and open source, that are emerging.
Register Today »

Related Content

From Our Sponsor

SaS

How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Cost

Business executives are challenging their IT staffs to convert data centers from cost centers into producers of business value. Data centers can make a significant impact to the bottom line by enabling the business to respond more quickly to market demands. This paper demonstrates, through a series of examples, how data center infrastructure management software tools can simplify operational processes, cut costs, and speed up information delivery.

Impact of Hot and Cold Aisle Containment on Data Center Temperature and Efficiency

Both hot-air and cold-air containment can improve the predictability and efficiency of traditional data center cooling systems. While both approaches minimize the mixing of hot and cold air, there are practical differences in implementation and operation that have significant consequences on work environment conditions, PUE, and economizer mode hours. The choice of hot-aisle containment over cold-aisle containment can save 43% in annual cooling system energy cost, corresponding to a 15% reduction in annualized PUE. This paper examines both methodologies and highlights the reasons why hot-aisle containment emerges as the preferred best practice for new data centers.

Monitoring Physical Threats in the Data Center

Traditional methodologies for monitoring the data center environment are no longer sufficient. With technologies such as blade servers driving up cooling demands and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley driving up data security requirements, the physical environment in the data center must be watched more closely. While well understood protocols exist for monitoring physical devices such as UPS systems, computer room air conditioners, and fire suppression systems, there is a class of distributed monitoring points that is often ignored. This paper describes this class of threats, suggests approaches to deploying monitoring devices, and provides best practices in leveraging the collected data to reduce downtime.

Cooling Strategies for Ultra-High Density Racks and Blade Servers

Rack power of 10 kW per rack or more can result from the deployment of high density information technology equipment such as blade servers. This creates difficult cooling challenges in a data center environment where the industry average rack power consumption is under 2 kW. Five strategies for deploying ultra-high power racks are described, covering practical solutions for both new and existing data centers.

Power and Cooling Capacity Management for Data Centers

High density IT equipment stresses the power density capability of modern data centers. Installation and unmanaged proliferation of this equipment can lead to unexpected problems with power and cooling infrastructure including overheating, overloads, and loss of redundancy. The ability to measure and predict power and cooling capability at the rack enclosure level is required to ensure predictable performance and optimize use of the physical infrastructure resource. This paper describes the principles for achieving power and cooling capacity management.

Network Computing

Sponsored By Schneider Electric