Starboard Storage Blog

One of the main pressures facing organizations today is how to manage capacity. Countless hours are spent by IT professionals monitoring and managing storage capacity and utilization.

The storage market saw another acquisition and it is an interesting one, because of the technology that it represented.  Violin, an all-flash vendor, acquired Gridiron, an SSD caching appliance that sits in the network.  With this acquisition, Violin is in many regards recognizing the limitations of all-flash systems and looking for revenue streams that incorporate more traditional arrays.  Why do this?  Is it because we are coming up on the Superbowl?  No.  It is because traditional spinning disk is going to be around for a long time. 

By Karl Chen, CMO, Starboard Storage, Systems - The storage industry kicked the year off with an acquisition and while a small one it is a signal of the impact that next generation storage companies like Starboard are having on the market.

Imation announced that it is acquiring Nexsan. Nexsan has been around for a while and pulled back their IPO a few years ago. It is certainly not a very high value deal for Nexsan at 1.5x 2011 revenues. The bulk of Nexsan's 11k installations are SATA Beast and SATA Boy disk systems and JBODs and it has been principally seen as a vendor of disk drive enclosures. Imation has been mostly an archive tape cartridge provider trying to move into storage systems with their acquisition of the ProStor RDX Intellivault product over a year ago.

In 2012 Nexsan had tried to move upmarket with the delivery of a new unified storage system incorporating solid state drives built on top of Oracle ZFS. Unlike Starboard, they did not own the core platform software and patented IP required to deliver and sustain innovative enterprise-class unified hybrid storage systems. This has clearly contributed to Nexsan seeking an exit strategy. Imagine having to be at Oracle's mercy on storage software feature enhancements of your storage OS? That's what ZFS-based unified storage vendors like Nexsan and Tegile are dependent on.

Imation will merge Nexsan into their securities business according to announcement articles, so it will be interesting to see how that will playout in the market.