SanDisk Acquires FlashSoft To Expand Enterprise Lineup

Flash memory maker and storage system technologies provider SanDisk announced today that it has acquired FlashSoft, a company focused on caching software products. Going forward, SanDisk will sell FlashSoft’s products both as standalone software, as well as offer them in combination with its other products, including SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.

The company says that it expects the acquisition to be neutral to its earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013, but additional details were not provided.

FlashSoft is currently the maker of software for Flash Virtualization which lets customers increase application performance and virtualization capability while reducing hardware and operational costs. The software is available for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms.

With SSD-based caching, the most frequently accessed data resides close to the CPU in high-performance memory – this is how it offers the touted performance improvements. For customers, the end result is smaller, more cost effective storage configurations, which, in turn, allows them to deploy more virtual machines per server.

Through the acquisition, SanDisk is moving towards becoming a complete solution provider for enterprise and cloud customers by offering SSD-optimized software, including those from third party providers.

Update: Alongside this news, comes word that Divergent Ventures is exiting FlashSoft, one of its portfolio companies. Divergent was an early stage investor in FlashSoft in April 2011. It previously exited from Pliant Technology, another flash memory technology company, in 2011.