LSI Announces Agreement to Acquire SandForce
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 26, 2011 4:50 PM ESTFor much of the past year I've been hearing SandForce wanted to be bought. The price? $300M - $400M. A bit too rich for OCZ's blood, but a figure that I felt wasn't too high given the immense technological advantage that SandForce enjoyed. SandForce's biggest issue? It needed a partner that would bring sound validation methodology and the resources to actually test SF drives. I mentioned to many players in the SSD and HDD space that they should simply buy SandForce and make this easier on everyone. Today LSI announced that it would be the company to try and do just that.
Pending the typical closing conditions and regulatory approvals, LSI will acquire SandForce for $322M in cash plus assume another $48M in unvested SF stock options. LSI isn't much of a player in the consumer space but it hopes to use SandForce's controllers in a go at the enterprise market. A look back at the Vertex 3 in our Intel SSD 710 review shows just how strong SandForce's architecture can be in database server workloads. As I've written before, the enterprise space is where the high margin sales are and as a result many players in the SSD space are focusing on it.
For now don't expect anything to change with regards to SF drives in the client space, but OCZ's timing with Octane probably couldn't have been any better.
Source: LSI
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Beenthere - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
Enterprise isn't going to tolerate the SSD compatibility and reliability issues that the consumer segment is enduring.chbarg - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
In our office 5 out 6 Vertex 2 failed showing that SSDs are not ready for the enterprise.BTW, they were in completely different systems with AMD or Intel chipsets, in desktops or laptops.
Very dissapointed...
sanguy - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
And we have literally 100's of Intel 310 and 320 series SSD's in laptops, desktops, embedded systems, and servers and have ZERO failures.....Very happy.
Iketh - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
HAHA you bought Vertex drives for your office? The guy behind that decision should be fired, along with you for thinking OCZ represents the SSD market.The only option right now is Intel.
radium69 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
And crucial ;)scottjames_12 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Marvell would probably be more accurate - Crucial/Micron make NAND mainly, and drives using Marvell's controllers, if I'm not mistaken.radium69 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Absolutely right!scottjames_12 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
And Samsung ;)A5 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
This.Blackened144 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
We tried the same thing by purchasing 20 1TB OCZ Colossus drives.. We RMA'd about 10 of them before we decided to stop testing..