LSI buying Sandforce

[BingBangBop]

LSI agrees to buy Sandforce

What are LSI's long-term plans?

I'll leave speculation to the posters ...

 

[Mercutio]

The first thing that comes to my mind is that they're buying relevance in future storage products. Sandforce clearly has found itself a nice market with huge growth potential and a commanding if not dominating presence. That's not a bad thing and it match up well with the other parts of LSI's business that I'm aware of.

 

[ddrueding]

The REVO drives I've been buying are LSI RAID cards tied to Sandforce controllers tied to memory.

The pending Intel PCIe drives are Intel all the way.

If LSI/Sandforce wants to compete in a growing field with shrinking margins, consolidation might be their only play.

 

[Bozo]

I hope they are not going to let sandforce slowly die like they are doing with 3Ware.

 

[ddrueding]

3Ware was a competitor, you buy competitors to strip their tech and their customers before burying them.

Sandforce is a complimentary tech with a good name. It will give them leverage with the other users of that chipset as well.

 

[BingBangBop]

I hope they are not going to let sandforce slowly die like they are doing with 3Ware.

I doubt it. 3ware was a previous direct competitor to LSI, so allowing 3ware to die doesn't harm them that much for all they are doing is scavenging the market share. With the Sandforce purchase, LSI bought into IP that they have never had before.

What I would worry about more would be that LSI change Sandforces's business model and produce some SSD's unique to LSI and then price them out of the consumer market. To my knowledge, LSI has never really ventured into consumer products before and they have also never run their business by licensing a product to others either. They are in new territory for them and that worries me for they can screw this up.

Personally, I think LSI bought Sandforce really cheap. Cudo's LSI

 

[Adcadet]

Is Sandforce used much in the business market? I get the sense that the controllers are all very consumer-oriented, or perhaps that's just a function of questionable reliability.

 

[ddrueding]

Sandforce were the guys to figure out how to get the write amplification under control so MLC could have decent write cycles. IIRC, their stuff is also used in the Z-Drive and their top-end VeloDrive.

 

[CougTek]

Sandforce is a good business to buy. They have significant volume sales in certain areas of the West Coast.

 

[ddrueding]

 

[LunarMist]

So LSI destroys the competition at the PCIe card level, but will the Sandstorm controller chips still be sold to SSD manufacturers?

 

[Stereodude]

So LSI destroys the competition at the PCIe card level, but will the Sandstorm controller chips still be sold to SSD manufacturers?

Of course, why wouldn't they?

 

[sechs]

Republican mind control.

 

[LunarMist]

:scratch: