Micron to acquire PCIe virtualization vendor Virtensys

Computerworld - Micron Technology on Friday announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Virtensys Ltd., a U.K.-based provider of PCIe-sharing products. No financial details on the deal were released.

Micron plans to use Virtensys' PCIe virtualization technology to allow data centers to share local solid-state drive (SSDs) storage across multiple servers.

For example, Virtensys' VIO-4000 Series PCIe Sharing appliances can virtualize network and storage connectivity to a rack of servers, providing up to 80Gbps of Ethernet uplink bandwidth, 32 Gbps of Fibre Channel bandwidth, and/or up to 16TB of local storage connectivity to up to 16 servers.

Virtensys' Vio-4000 PCIe I/O sharing appliance

Edward Doller, Micron's chief memory systems architect, said the acquisition would enable "a combination of enterprise technology solutions that have the opportunity to virtualize SSD storage on the path to a more flexible and dynamic data center."

Micron will continue to support their deployment of I/O virtualization products. We have been working closely with Virtensys to include our PCIe SSD [P320] into their appliance and plan on rolling that solution out later this year," Doller said.

Micron said it expects the transaction to close by the end of the month.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

Read more about Data Storage in Computerworld's Data Storage Topic Center.