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In December 2011, the closely scrutinized $1.4 billion Seagate-Samsung deal closed to place an exclamation point on the year by which hard disks (HDDs) and solid-condition drive (SSD) technology were in demand. There is a lot of consolidation among hard disk suppliers throughout the entire year, carrying out a flurry of storage array purchases this year. But storage array purchases didn’t entirely disappear this year.

1. Seagate-Samsung make deadline, Western Digital-HGST deal pending.

Seagate Technology acquired Samsung Electronics’ M8 products for $1.4 billion in December. The offer needed seven several weeks to shut, mainly due to major regulating hurdles. The Seagate-Samsung acquisition gave Seagate its archrival’s enterprise hard disk business, which brought government bodies to possess serious concerns by what which means for competition available on the market. The offer gives Seagate Samsung’s type of 2.5-inch high-capacity hard disk drives. Samsung will even provide Seagate with chips for enterprise SSDs, while Seagate will give hard disk drives to Samsung for Computers and consumer products.

Using the alarms sounding the brand new Year, the greatest hard disk deal of — Western Digital’s suggested $4.3 billion takeover of Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST) – didn’t near the coast time for you to result in the 2011 calendar. The Western Digital-HGST deal is anticipated to shut next March, annually after it was initially introduced. The close was postponed by anti-trust rules, but Western Digital finally won Eu approval in November to get Hitachi’s Hard disk drive business after saying yes to market off some assets to get rid of concerns regarding competition.

2. Hitachi and BlueArc make it official.

The only real surprise with this particular data storage technology acquisition is it required such a long time. Before finishing the $600 million Hitachi-BlueArc deal, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) offered BlueArc NAS systems for 5 years with an OEM deal. And although BlueArc filed forms to accomplish an IPO and go public, it depended on HDS in excess of 40% of their revenue and not were built with a lucrative quarter before joining the HDS fold.

3. Oracle brings Pillar in to the fold.

It’s tough to put a cost on that one. What we should can say for certain is the fact that Oracle Corp. Boss Ray Ellison plus some key business affiliates were owed $544 million by Pillar Data Systems, caused by financial loans and interest that funded Pillar from the beginning. In This summer, Oracle acquired Pillar, calling it a vital 4th element to the data storage strategy. Just how much Oracle really pays Ellison, Pillar and also the a number of other gamers involved won’t be revealed until 2014, when Pillar’s performance is going to be examined.

But enough concerning the amounts let’s talk storage. Pillar’s Axiom storage array handles block and file work on the same time frame, and it is application-aware — using faster disk drives for data that’s more dynamic than data designated to reduced disks. The Oracle purchase of Pillar was referred to by Oracle included in its technique to “redefine storage” and, essentially, build out a type of hardware items which makes its programs improve your speed.

4. NetApp grabs LSI’s Engenio.

NetApp Corporation.’s $480 million purchase of LSI’s Engenio means NetApp has two platforms after many years of positioning its single, unified platform like a competitive advantage versus. the different network-attached storage (NAS) and storage-area network (SAN) possibilities using their company suppliers. But NetApp executives performed in the two different marketplaces the organization is focusing on, saying the Engenio block-storage systems is going to be situated in video along with other high-performance computing (HPC) marketplaces as the NetApp FAS platform is targeted at mainstream storage and virtualized infrastructures. Just like the HDS-BlueArc and Oracle-Pillar deals, the gamers within this acquisition understood one another well- NetApp Boss Tom Georgens held exactly the same publish at Engenio before joining NetApp in 2005.

5. SanDisk bets on Pliant, multi-level cell (MLC).

SanDisk Corp. acquired startup Pliant Technology for $327 million, giving SanDisk entry in to the enterprise market and supplying more assets for growth and development of Pliant’s technology. SanDisk purchasing Pliant was the business’s method of betting on Pliant’s MLC-based expensive technology because the next large factor. SanDisk intends to still sell Pliant’ single-level cell (SLC) expensive too, but SanDisk executives see MLC as the easiest method to push more expensive technology into enterprise shops.

6. Fusion-io acquires caching software startup IO Turbine.

PCI Express (PCIe)-based solid-condition storage vendor Fusion-io Corporation. went public this year making its first acquisition a couple of several weeks later. Feeling the warmth using their company expensive suppliers for example STEC Corporation. and also the OCZ Technology Group Corporation. — which each introduced new PCIe-based SSD choices this year — Fusion-io bought caching software startup IO Turbine for roughly $95 million. Fusion-io purchasing IO Turbine outlined the growing recognition of SSD-based, or expensive-based, caching.

7. Quantum pockets Pancetera.

Backup and archive player Quantum Corp. acquired Pancetera Software for $12 million. Quantum acquired the virtual machine (VM) backup specialist to enhance its DXi data deduplication line and, eventually, its StorNext file system. The majority of Pancetera’s employees became a member of Quantum, such as the co-founders and Boss, and also the acquisition was seen for Quantum to achieve credibility in the region of safeguarding data on virtual servers.