QLogic made a bold move into the intelligent storage switch market late Tuesday with the acquisition of Troika Networks for $36.5 million in cash.
But rather than move up market into high-end storage virtualization, QLogic marketing vice president Frank Berry said the company plans to bring storage virtualization to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
“Until now, the virtualization market has been dominated by high-end solutions consisting of software (snapshot, replication, etc.) running on high-end chassis hardware (Cisco),” Berry said in an e-mail to Enterprise Storage Forum.
“Our goal is to help OEMs create a new class of virtualization solutions for small and medium enterprises,” Berry said. “The new class of solutions would consist of the same OEM software (snapshot, replication, etc.) ported onto a high-performance, low-cost hardware platform.”
QLogic, which makes Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, recently sold its disk and tape controller business to Marvell for $225 million to focus on building its SAN infrastructure business. The company mentioned storage virtualization as one area it planned to target.
The intelligent storage switch market has undergone a dramatic shakeup in recent months, as the entry of major players such as EMC, IBM and HDS has dramatically reduced the ranks of startups. QLogic’s acquisition of Troika makes MaXXan the last standalone intelligent storage switch start-up.
Anthem Venture Partners, the lead investor in Troika, advised Troika on the transaction.