Just five days after HP announced it would acquire IBRIX, another scale-out NAS provider has been purchased. LSI announced today that it would acquire ONStor for $25 million in cash. The company sold a range of SAN and NAS storage systems, but was best-known for its Bobcat clustered NAS gateways.
Unlike IBRIX, which sold software to transform commodity hardware into a clustered NAS solution, ONStor designed both the hardware and software included in their home-grown products. The company also re-sold Fujitsu’s Eternus and Nexsan SATA storage systems and Tek-Tools software. ONStor raised $80 million in its 9 years of operation.
LSI has found success supplying hardware components to the storage and networking markets. In April, the company purchased the 3ware RAID adapter business from AMCC. LSI’s storage operations were to be spun out as Engenio in a 2004 IPO that never happened. That operation later re-joined the LSI mothership, combining with the storage controller business. This is where ONStor will land as well. LSI manufactures components on an OEM basis for many in the storage industry, including BlueArc, IBM, MaXXan, Sepaton, and Sun.
What does LSI get for their $25 million?
- ONStor’s EverON software, which powers its NAS and IP storage product lines and includes the StorFS scalable file system. EverON offers clustering with a global namespace, automated pooling and provisioning, and snapshots.
- The Bobcat and Cougar Broadcom-powered NAS gateway hardware platforms offer energy-efficient and scalable virtualized and clustered NAS in front of existing SAN or NAS storage capacity using the EverON OS.
- The Pantera system uses Intel Xeon CPUs and adds iSCSI to the mix. It uses a different operating system which leverages ZFS.
- ONStor also re-sold the Fujitsu Eternus 2000 and 4000 Fibre Channel SAN storage systems.
LSI is likely to be eager to leverage the EverON software and Bobcat/Cougar platforms with their OEM partners. Expect many vendors (ahem: IBM) to quickly counter HP’s new IBRIX-powered scalable NAS with LSI-powered alternatives. The Pantera seems less-likely to be of interest to OEMs, being based on commodity hardware and software. And continuation of the Eternus line seems flat-out illogical.
More coverage: Terri McClure and Mark Peters of ESG
