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Chipmaker SanDisk Corp said it would buy the well know flash storage device maker Fusion-io Inc for about $1.1 billion.

With this move SanDisk can doubled down on its strategy to target the enterprise and data centers, considering that Fusion-io is already used in the enterprise, with really big customers like Apple and Facebook.

SanDisk is probably know more for the consumers products (lot of flash memory card are from this vendor), but has several interesting products also for the enterprise (see this post about their caching product).

Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of SanDisk, said Fusion-io will help it target the “flash-transformed data center”. Fusion-io CEO Shane Robison, a Hewlett-Packard veteran brought on to revamp the company’s sales model, said the SanDisk deal gives the company a better chance to deliver innovation for customers.

SanDisk-Logo FusionIO-Logo

For sure a company that can build a complete hardware and software solution for flash caching (not necessary only at host side, considering that Fusion-io cards are used also on storage side) could become really interesting.

Interesting that one of the alternative product for Fusion-io was acquired some month ago by a storage (Western Digital Completes Acquisition of sTec, Inc.) in order to build another big company still for the enterprise segment.

For sure this mean more (and more) attention on the enterprise storage that are shifting more (and more) on the flash side.

Will be interesting see if this operation will conclude and what could mean for other companies, like software only caching solution (SanDisk software solution maybe is not the most know, but it support Windows, Linux and VMware) or other storage vendor (actually SanDisk software is hardware independed and could be used on different flash products).

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.