Samsung buys SSD caching vendor Nvelo

IDG News Service - Samsung Electronics has acquired Nvelo, a Silicon Valley vendor of products for caching data on flash-based SSDs (solid-state disks).

Nvelo is privately held and based in Santa Clara, California, and the terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition involves all the company's technology and personnel, Samsung said.

Nvelo's Dataplex software is designed for caching data in SSDs to improve the speed of retrieval in devices that use either HDDs (hard disk drives) or SSDs for their main storage. The company says its technology can identify the data that the user needs most often and place that in the cache. That data also remains in the main storage. Flash vendors including OCZ Technology, Corsair and Crucial sell Dataplex bundled with their own products, according to Nvelo.

The use of flash storage in conjunction with HDDs has increased in recent years. SSDs retrieve data faster than HDDs but cost more per bit. Caching the most often accessed data on flash while keeping other bits on disk offers a more economical way to achieve high performance.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com