Silicon Image, Inc. today announced it has acquired CMD Technology, Inc., a provider of high-performance and high-availability storage solutions that serve as the building blocks for Storage Area Networks (SANs). With this acquisition, Silicon Image says it accelerates its move into the Serial ATA segment of the storage market.
CMD is a vendor for SCSI and Fibre Channel storage controller solutions for the UNIX, Open Systems and PC markets, as well as a leading supplier of IDE/Ultra ATA semiconductors for the PC and embedded markets. CMD also provides a wide range of complementary software and firmware products and services, including its industry-renowned Medley RAID software. Counting Cisco, Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems among its valued customers, CMD brings an experienced sales force, as well as strategic partnerships with an elite group of VARs, system integrators and resellers worldwide.
The combination of Silicon Images field-proven, high-bandwidth, scalable semiconductor I/O solutions and CMDs extensive storage systems hardware and software expertise positions, Silicon Image thinks, the combined entity to be a significant solutions provider for the emerging Serial ATA market. Market research firm IDC believes Serial ATA will become a viable alternative to SCSI for low-end systems, while ATA drivesincluding those with both parallel and serial interconnectsare anticipated to reach nearly 20 percent penetration of server shipments by 2004. Silicon Image is targeting this multi-billion-dollar opportunity and is now poised to speed the industrys transition from Parallel to Serial ATA and offer breakthrough price/performance to enterprise customers seeking robust SAN solutions based on Serial ATA.