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 […]
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.
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.
Enterprise Storage Forum offers practical information on data storage and protection from several different perspectives: hardware, software, on-premises services and cloud services. It also includes storage security and deep looks into various storage technologies, including object storage and modern parallel file systems. ESF is an ideal website for enterprise storage admins, CTOs and storage architects to reference in order to stay informed about the latest products, services and trends in the storage industry.
Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.
