SanDisk To Acquire Fusion-io

It looks like the SSD industry is going through some serious consolidation. Only a couple of weeks ago, Seagate announced that they have acquired LSI’s flash division (i.e. SandForce) from Avago and today SanDisk announced that they will be acquiring Fusion-IO for $1.1 billion cash. Fusion-IO focuses on enterprise flash products (both hardware and software) and is probably one of the most iconic enterprise SSD companies because Facebook has been one of their major revenue sources for years and of course having Steve Wozniak as the Chief Scientist has given Fusion-io a lot of publicity as well.

I think this acquisition further reinforces the point that companies without a NAND fab are in trouble. Fusion-io’s advantage in the market was their early entry, which allowed them to build a good customer base before the likes of Intel and Samsung started to take SSDs seriously. However, now it’s hard for Fusion-io and other fabless companies to stay price competitive because the companies with NAND plants can always undercut their prices as ultimately Fusion-io buys their NAND from the companies that are their biggest rivals in the SSD market. Obviously, the NAND manufacturers are looking to make profit from the NAND they sell, so the price battle is one that Fusion-io and the others can’t win in long-term. SanDisk has a NAND joint-venture with Toshiba, so this acquisition gives Fusion-io a direct access to NAND.

Source: Gartner HWQ via TheRegister.co.uk

As for SanDisk, their enterprise solutions have been a bit tame compared to Samsung and Intel. SanDisk has a vertical integration model but for some reason their enterprise products just haven’t had the same momentum. SanDisk did manage to increase their enterprise SSD revenue significantly in 2013 but they must be able to keep up the growth. With Fusion-io’s existing revenue sources and SanDisk’s vertical integration business model, SanDisk should definitely have the ammunition to challenge Intel and Samsung in the enterprise space.

SanDisk is hosting a conference call later today, so stay tuned for updates. The press release doesn’t specify whether Fusion-io will be integrated into SanDisks’s enterprise storage unit but we should know more after the conference call. This is certainly one of the biggest news in the history of enterprise SSDs given that SanDisk and Fusion-io were the number four and five in revenue last year, so I’m very excited to see how it plays out. 

Computex 2014: QNAP Shows HS-251 Silent NAS And More

Continuing with NAS coverage from Computes, QNAP had a few new products to show, including the new HS-251 silent NAS. However, I spent most of my time looking at their software and especially virtualization because that was a feature QNAP highlighted heavily, mostly because they now support virtualization even in lower-end models. 

The virtualization window is very simple to use and the software supports imported VMs from most virtualization software. Exporting is also possible in case you want or need to move the VM to another machine. There is also a snapshot feature that allows you to take a snapshot of the system state and then return to that state later in case a user manages to break something for instance. 

Permissions can be set for every user and VM individually to ensure that the users only have access to what they need.

Overall the software is very app-centric and more apps can be downloaded from QNAP’s App Center. Cloud backups are of course supported as well with several service options. 

And now, the hardware. Another thing QNAP emphasized was their use of Intel Celeron CPUs instead of Atom that most of their competitors use. I think the specific SKU in this case is a Silvermont based Celeron J1750 (UPDATE: J1800), which should provide far better performance than the old Bonell based NAS-specific Atoms. QNAP said that this allows VMs to be run even in lower-end models, which is something that Atom doesn’t support (at least not that well). Obviously you won’t be able to run several VMs at once like in the pictures above but one VM should still be enough for home or even small business use. Moreover, Celeron CPUs are powerful enough to do transcoding on the fly, which can be beneficial in case you happen to use an Apple TV or other format picky media player. 

The HS-251 is successor to the popular HS-210 silent NAS. It features two 3.5″ hard drive bays and is passively cooled, meaning that the only noise will be coming from the hard drives (or no noise at all if you are crazy enough to go with SSDs). It features the same Celeron CPU as the TS-x51 series along with 1080p video and 7.1 audio playback.

For connectivity there are two Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0, HDMI and optical audio ports. I think the HS-251 should be a great fit for people who are looking for a NAS that functions as a media player because unlike with traditional NASs, there is no extra noise from the fans that could negatively impact the experience. 

Computex 2014: ASUSTOR Announces 7 Series NAS & Shows ADM 2.2 Operating System

While NASs are more of Ganesh’ expertise, I dropped by the biggest NAS manufacturers at this year’s Computex as Ganesh was unable to attend the show. First up is ASUSTOR who introduced a new 7 Series NAS for the high-end market. 

The 7 Series NAS is mostly aimed towards the enterprise and comes in two form factors: rackmount and desktop tower. The rackmount model is available in two sizes with the smaller one being a 9-bay and the bigger being a 12-bay solution. Both version come with either an Intel Core i3-4330 or Xeon E3 processor depending on the customer’s choice. The default configuration ships with 4GB of DDR3 but that is expandable to up to 32GB. Connectivity wise there are four Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0 and two eSATA ports for additional storage and two HDMI ports along with a VGA port for display connectivity.

The desktop tower version drops one bay at the low-end and two at the high-end and thus comes in 8-bay and 10-bay configurations. The processor is the same i3-4330 but there is no option for a Xeon CPU and the RAM changes from UDIMMs to SO-DIMMs with the default capacity being 2GB (up to 16GB). Gigabit Ethernet ports drop to two as well but there are still three USB 3.0, two USB 2.0 and two eSATA ports. For video output there are two HDMI ports and one audio output.

ASUSTOR also had their other NAS lineup at their booth. The 6 Series is available from two to eight bay configurations and ships with a 2.13GHz Atom CPU along with 1GB of DDR3.

Moving to the mainstream models, the 3 Series comes in two and four bay options and ships with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 1GB of DDR3. Similar to the higher-end models, the 3 Series has an HDMI port, making it viable as a media player as well with 1080p playback support. 

And finally the 2 Series. This is the low-end series with no video playback support, so it’s suited for people who just want a regular NAS with no added features. Two and four bay models are available and the CPU is a 1.2GHz Atom with 512MB of DDR3. 

ASUSTOR was also showing the new ADM software. This is the HTPC view with the desktop mode being a bit more iOS-like. The new 2.2 version brings Mail Server and Photo Gallery apps for instance and there are over a hundred apps in ASUSTOR’s App Central, which are designed for NAS use.