This week was full of M&A news, but also saw some new features on ServeTheHome. Also, Fusion-io and Supermicro teamed up to create an IOPS powerhouse.
ServeTheHome’s Forums Get New Resources
Forum moderator odditory has added a few great FAQs/ Wikis on the ServeTheHome.com forums this week. First is the PMC Sierra based HP SAS Expander FAQ/ Wiki which is a card mentioned often on ServeTheHome. Another interesting SAS Expander option for many users will be the Intel RES2SV240 24-port SAS2 Expander Wiki.
I added a new thread and FAQ about the Intel Xeon E3-1200 series CPUs. Information has been scarce about these CPUs so I thought I would at least provide a resource for users.
Western Digital Announced Plans to Purchase Hitachi GST
Monday morning the storage industry was awaken by a giant announcement. In a deal valued at $4.3 billion that would bring Hitachi’s hard drive manufacturing division over to Western Digital creating by far the largest hard drive manufacturer in the world. This ends the close race between Seagate and Western Digital that has been going for a few quarters now.
NetApp Buys LSI Engenio Storage Systems Business
As mentioned Wednesday, NetApp agreed to buy a storage division from LSI. The $480 million deal actually had a fairly low valuation as the LSI unit brings in a $100 million annual profit. Furthermore, this LSI division is one previously headed by NetApp’s current CEO, Tom Gorgens.
Fusionio and Supermicro’s 1U IOPS Monster
Fusion-io and Supermicro announced a new 1U SuperServer (SYS-6016GT-TF) powered by Fusion-io’s ioDrive Octal that supports up to 1.4million random IOPS. Just to give one an idea of how fast this is the brand new LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i controller based on the LSI2208 controller is spec’d at only about one third the speed (465,000 IOPS) and the newly announced OCZ Vertex 3 Pro is spec’d at only 70,000 IOPS. Very interesting machine indeed.
