Storage News: Fusion-io, Seagate, LaCie, iWave

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the storage industry:

Fusion-io powers IO Accelerators in HP platforms.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that it is enabling high performance database and virtualization solutions with seven new Fusion-powered HP IO Accelerator products for HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem platforms. The HP IO Accelerators sit inside the server, directly on the PCIe bus with CPUs and Memory, rather than external to the server in a storage array being accessed over much slower links.  The IO Accelerators boost applications by bypassing traditional storage controllers and unlocking trapped compute cycles. HP is the first to market with Fusion-io’s Gen 2 technology, and by deploying it within HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, customers are able to build highly flexible, cost effective and scalable solutions while reducing datacenter complexity and the associated operational costs. “The new HP IO Accelerators with VMware View provide an efficient and powerful solution for desktop virtualization deployments,” said Vittorio Viarengo, vice president, End-User Computing at VMware.  “Customers benefit with increased virtual machine density, scalability and performance within the new HP ProLiant Gen8 servers when deploying the IO Accelerators. This is a strong value proposition for customers using this technology as a part of their desktop virtualization deployment.” Fusion-io will be giving demonstrations of the HP IO Accelerators at the HP Discover 2012 conference June 4-7 in Las Vegas.

Seagate to acquire controlling interest in LaCie.  Seagate Technology (STX) and LaCie (LAC) announced an exclusive agreement with the intent for Seagate to acquire a controlling interest in LaCie. Seagate has offered to purchase from Philippe Spruch, LaCie’s chairman and CEO, and his affiliate, all of their shares, representing 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie. The transaction would combine two complementary product and technology portfolios, adding LaCie’s line of premium branded consumer storage solutions, network-attached storage solutions and software offerings to Seagate’s array of mainstream consumer storage products. "Seagate has a strong commitment to the growing consumer storage market and bringing the most dynamic products to market. LaCie has built an exceptional consumer brand by delivering exciting and innovative high-end products for many years. This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

iWave announces Storage Automator v6.  Storage and cloud automation solutions provider iWave Software announced iWave Storage Automator version 6 (v6), a storage automation software product that lets enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver Storage as a Service using their existing storage environments. Key features in version 6 include policy-based storage selection, multi-tenant self service portal and catalog, end-to-end automated storage services, change control, chargeback, and service level options. "The goal of storage automation software like iWave Storage Automator is to have less people spend less time focused on managing storage," said George Crump, CEO of analyst firm Storage Switzerland. "While not a replacement for skilled storage administrators, these next-generation storage automation products incorporate concepts from the cloud automation world and offer the promise of significant productivity gains by enabling administrators to create and offer automated storage services directly to their users via a self-service portal and catalog."