Samsung Acquires SSD Caching Company NVELO
by Kristian Vättö on December 16, 2012 12:36 PM ESTThis came out of the blue. Samsung announced their intent to acquire NVELO, known for their Dataplex SSD caching software. Price or specific timeframe of the acquisition have not been revealed yet, but the acquisition does include all NVELO technology and personnel.
NVELO as a company may be a new acquaintance for many as it was founded only two years ago as a spin-off from Denali Software, which was acquired by Cadence in June 2010. While NVELO has not been around for long, the company is full of experience as most of the employees worked over a decade for Denali before the acquisition. In fact, Dataplex development began in 2007 when Denali was still a standalone company.
There are several products in the market that use NVELO's Dataplex software such as OCZ's Synapse, Corsair's Accelerator and Crucial's Adrenaline SSDs. Dataplex is essentially an alternative to Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT) but with fewer limitations. For example, Dataplex is not tied to any specific chipsets, making it a viable option for AMD based setups and older systems without Intel's SRT support. There is also no 64GB cache size limitation like in Intel's SRT, although most of the SSDs that are bundled with Dataplex are 64GB or smaller. Whether it's worth it to use an SSD bigger than 64GB for caching is a different question, but at least there is an option for that. We have played around with NVELO's Dataplex in our labs but we haven't thoroughly reviewed it (yet).
While at least I didn't expect this acquisition, it does make a lot of sense. SSD prices have come down significantly in the last few years but we still aren't at a point where SSDs can replace hard drives in mainstream products. However, the difference an SSD makes is just so substantial that there is no reason not to want an SSD. The advantage of caching is that you can have SSD-like performance with plenty of storage without breaking the bank. Samsung doesn't have any consumer-grade SSD caching products, so with the acquisition it seems that Samsung is interested in entering that market. Why Samsung chose to acquire NVELO instead of just licensing the Dataplex software is a good question, but it's possible that Samsung wants to develop something in the house instead of using a commercially available solution (given the significant vertical integration already present in their SSDs, this wouldn't be a surprise). The acquisition may also be a way to eliminate competition because Samsung can force the competitors to get out of the SSD caching market or to use another solution (assuming Samsung makes Dataplex proprietary).
Source: NVELO Press Release
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Doh! - Monday, December 17, 2012 - link
Samsung owns about 10% of Seagate and serves on their board. An agreement is also in place in which Samsung guarantees a supply of flash memory to Seagate. In case of hybrid drives, Seagate will more likely to be the manufacturer, not Samsung.Yongsta - Monday, December 17, 2012 - link
They kept the SSD division as part of their RAM / Optical / Flash Memory division. Their regular spinning HDD division was sold off to Seagate.mayankleoboy1 - Monday, December 17, 2012 - link
I think its high time for companies like Seagate and WD to start integrating flash in all their HDD's at the same price as older HDD's. Flash is cheap enough, i think.haukionkannel - Monday, December 17, 2012 - link
Well I would really much like to see Samsung Spinpoint with 840 pro series technology as an cache... Pity that Samsung does not have HDD production any more. I trust my old spinpoint drives as much as Samsum 830 series and if 840 is as good, it would have been an happy marriage...Macabre215 - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
Be gone spammer.faisa001 - Thursday, December 27, 2012 - link
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