I do not believe much needs to be said on this acquisition. We all know who EMC is and what it is famous for. ScaleIO last year (2012) came out of the stealth mode and recently got acquired by EMC for something like $200m to $300m depending on the source. Looks like portion of the team came from XtremIO that was couple of years acquired by EMC (see the pattern?).
With this new addition to Fusion IO portfolio it has a clear path into Continue reading
Today FusionIO acquired UK based ID7 provider for Software Defined Storage. ID7 is a driving force behind the Generic SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux. It enables the following functionality: replication, thin provisioning, deduplication, high availability, and automatic backup on any Linux server or appliance (http://scst.sourceforge.net/index.html).
ID7 worked with FIO on ION which now provides more context for the last conversation that we had with FIO on SDK where Stephanie indicated that ION implementation has switched (no more details were given). ID7 joined the ION Acceleration effort where they will continue driving this effort (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fusion-io-acquires-id7-198762381.html).
It is expected that the products developed through this merger will target SAN systems users from mainstream storage suppliers, most of which are high-end. However, “we won’t aim at the highest end users,” says Flynn. ”Facebook, Apple etc use the application database to manage things. But hosting and cloud providers, for example, are often forced to buy proprietary systems. Software-defined systems can offer them high-end systems without the high-end price.”
With the ID7 acquisition, Fusion-io will pick up both general and specific software expertise. While ID7 develops storage software for iSCSI, Fibre Channel and Infiniband, SCST was originally designed for both SCSI and Linux. That represents one of the smaller parts of what IDC calls the Open SAN market, which consists of FC SAN, FCoE, iSCSI, and others. (About $3.2 billion of iSCSI storage arrays were sold in 2012, IDC said, according to private figures cited by EMC marketing CTO Chuck Hollis.)
Since SCST’s initial development, Fibre Channel and iSCSI support have been added, as well as support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet. And SCST supplies quite a bit: replication, thin provisioning, de-duplication, high availability, and automatic backup on any Linux server or appliance. (For more on building an SSD disk array over Fibre Channel using SCST, see Marc A. Smith’s blog post on the subject.)
Fusion-io said it would continue to maintain the open-source version of SCST, as well as contribute to the open-source distribution as it continues development. The ID7 team, including the primary SCST developers, will join Fusion-io but work from their current locations (http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/fusion-io-buys-id7/).
“Across Linux and Oracle subsystems, Fusion-io has embraced the need to support open source contributions to innovation in the storage stack,” said Vlad Bolkhovitin, Founder and Primary Developer of the SCST SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux. “By joining the Fusion-io team, we are pleased to be able to provide SCST with more engineering resources and talent to support the development of the open source and commercial SCST subsystems as we meet the needs of Fusion-io customers around the globe.”
In conclusion this acquisition positions FIO not only as a provider of Flash for homegrown scale out solutions engineered inside the Facebook and Apple datacenter but also play a key role in the datacenter providing high end storage with ION directly against EMC’s XtremIO.