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Wheeling & Dealing
Got cash? Good. If you're a storage vendor, let's spend it
September 2, 2006
2 Min Read
2:20 PM -- It's not the end of a quarter, but storage money's flying around big time.
Four different deals made headlines in this last week of summer with acquisitions totaling well over $200 million. Now none of these were blockbusters, but the sheer volume of dealmaking (or deal closing) in four days made it clear there's money burning holes in many pockets around the industry.
To review:
Rackable Racks Up Terrascale. Who? Terrascale, a small Canadian software vendor that makes clustered file systems for high-speed I/O between storage and servers. Additional evidence the clustering approach is hot and that the line between servers and storage has blurred even more.
Emulex Secures Sierra Logic. At $180 million, the biggest deal of the week, and a chance for Emulex to move beyond its Fibre Channel roots by buying the SATA bridge and router maker. The two vendors have lots of OEM partners in common, and the fact that lots of other VC cash is chasing this same space makes this look like a pretty sharp move.
Tandberg Bags Exabyte for $28M. Or, as some have described it: storage euthanasia. Exabyte has been on a long, downhill slide; whether Tandberg can revive it or derive any value from its technology or customer base is the $28 million question.
QLogic Eyes SilverStorm. No firm price tag. (Sources peg it at $60 million, but officials aren't commenting), or even signatures on an agreement in principle yet. But it's just about a done deal and will mark QLogic's second Infiniband acquisition of the year. Maybe Cisco put 'em up to it. (See Cisco Rattles Storage Sabre.)
All this money talk makes me think it's time to balance my checkbook, which is remarkably free of 8-figure transactions. I'll have plenty of time to do it over the long holiday weekend, since the staff of Byte and Switch will be taking off Monday. We'll pick it all up again Tuesday and see what new deals have been hatched.
Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch
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