OCZ Technology Group, on Monday announced it had acquired Sanrad, a privately held provider of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware. The takeover will allow OCZ to boost its portfolio of technologies for enterprise-class solid-state drives.

"This transaction is an important step in OCZ's enterprise solid state drive strategy. It significantly enhances the ability for customers to increase datacenter performance and efficiency by putting more virtual machines (VM) on a server without slowing down the VM’s ability to access stored data, thus substantially lowering the overall cost of deployment,” said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ Technology Group.

Sanrad transforms storage access in virtualized environments with NAND flash. Its technology allows data centers to fully leverage their flash based storage investments, extending the lifespan of the storage infrastructure and maximizing efficiency. Virtualized data centers gain the benefits of NAND flash performance while retaining the key benefits of server virtualization such as vMotion, high availability, and disaster recovery.

Sanrad’s virtualization software and solutions are VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix certified and are expected to accelerate the adoption of OCZ’s PCIe-based flash storage solutions in virtualized environments.

Sanrad’s VXL software delivers Sanrad’s flash caching and virtualization technology for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen into server virtualization platforms. VXL software enables efficient dynamic distribution of host-based flash resources to guest virtual machines via its application optimized cache engine. The VXL SCSI connectivity enables support of most modern operating systems including all variants of Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux servers.

VXL supports key enterprise-class storage datacenter requirements such as QoS, high availability clustering, mirroring, WAN replication, snapshots and multiple storage virtualization functions. VXL guarantees complete cache migration via vMotion, as cached data is treated as a virtualized storage entity and can be dynamically migrated between ESX servers along with the virtual volumes without performance loss and without powering down the server, interrupting service of the VM’s.

Sanrad’s StoragePro software provides comprehensive remote storage management and virtualization services and ensures simple, efficient use of storage resources for numerous connected servers. Its open, heterogeneous system architecture provides complete storage flexibility, enabling IT managers to manage a single virtual pool of storage which is critical in today’s enterprise environments.

“Sanrad’s VXL has the ability to optimize caching strategies based on the application and support for VMWare’s vMotion, which sets the solution apart from others in the industry, allowing enterprises to finally realize the benefit of running a single unified virtualized environment," concluded Mr. Petersen.

Sanrad was founded in 2000 and its R&D center is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Sanrad currently sells its line of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware to storage and networking OEMs such as Nexsan and Brocade as well as directly to the enterprise through its network of value added resellers.

The aggregate purchase price of the acquisition was $15 million comprised of approximately 2.1 million shares of OCZ common stock that was issued on closing.

Tags: OCZ, Sanrad, SSD, NAND, Flash